When Ad (Peter Faber) sends his wife, Eve (Monique van de Ven), off on a vacation with her friend Sonja (Marijke Merckens), he reasonably expects her to return refreshed and rejuvenated. Technically she does — just not in the way he’d like. He wants her to again appear happy performing the housewifely duties that not long ago had stifled her to the point of practically inducing a breakdown at a recent Mother’s Day brunch. But after Eve by chance befriends some women living in a commune during the trip, she becomes more aware than ever just how little of her life caters to what she alone wants. Everything is in service to the needs of her children — this is actually the first vacation of her own she’s taken apart from them since their births — and her husband.
When she comes home, Eve starts taking the cooking and cleaning she used to be so worried about less seriously. She attempts to organize with the other women in her apartment building to echo the collaborative spirit of the commune. And she even begins trying to learn French in her free time — something inspired by Liliane (Maria Schneider), a woman from the commune she was particularly taken with and, after a few more friendly, then romantic, encounters, will fall in love with.
A Woman Like Eve (1979) doesn’t really luxuriate in their romance. It will more and more feel like a supplementary detail. The movie, directed and co-written by Nouchka van Brakel, frames it as matter-of-fact and natural — ordinary to the point of being unremarkable. The real drama is reserved for the fallout following suit when a new relationship comes at the expense of another with lots of string attached. Without its gay romance, A Woman Like Eve isn’t far from other divorce dramas, a subgenre overwhelmed by, if not exclusively spotlighting, straight couples.
Eve is excited to explore a long-suppressed side of herself, living a life more fulfilling than the one she’d been leading before. But the film realistically shakes with unconfidence around whether this new chapter will endure contentedly or will only usher in an unsatisfying unknown. Liliane loves Eve. But she’s also so fiercely independent and unwilling to make any sacrifices — she, for one thing, declares from the jump that she doesn’t really want to be involved with Eve’s kids’ upbringing — that we can’t be sure things will bode well for a couple in very different strata as far as what they want from, and think is important for, this relationship.
Some of the film’s staging and dialogue can be stilted. But emotionally it almost always rings true. Any glimmers of happiness are weighed down by what prices have had to be paid for them. Adversity is approached with a level head; Judith Herzberg, who co-wrote the movie with the director, never resorts to the sort of overblown tragedy endemic to media with lesbian characters. More common difficulties come to the fore: navigating the noxiousness of an unhappy husband unopposed to making public scenes; the court system’s inconsistencies.
Eve and Liliane are granted sole custody of the kids early on. Mostly that’s because the other option is a single dad inexperienced with substantive child rearing, given the nuclear-family idyll to which he and his ex had ascribed. But later, when Ad announces a new engagement, the court hardly hesitates before deciding that the kids actually would be better off with a man (who has proven in court to be crude and vitriolic, no less) and their new mother.
A Woman Like Eve doesn’t give that cruel twist the final word. But it also isn’t the kind of movie satisfied with an equivocally happy ending, either. It’s too smart to search for crumbs of sentimentality that wouldn’t be there in life. It rationally leaves things at the ambiguous possibility that things maybe will get better, or maybe they won’t. You can never be sure which road life will take you down. A Woman Like Eve gets this. Eve, for better and for worse, has now reached a point in her life where she can explore the different possibilities emerging before her, unbound by once-suffocating domestic expectations. The cost, though, is great. Pain muffles her triumph.
Peterson Reviews 