'' A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE '' : FILM HONOURS

Midway through '' A Woman Under the Influence '' [1974] - one of number of astonishing films starring Gena Rowlands, who died last Wednesday, and directed by her husband John Cassavetes - the distance between you and what's onscreen abruptly vanishes.

It's the kind of moment that true movie believers know and yearn for, that transporting instant when your world melts away and you're one with the film.

It can be revelatory; at times, as with Rowlands's performance here, it can also be excruciatingly, viscerally painful.

Rowlands is playing Mabel, an exuberantly alive woman of great sensitivities whose husband, Nicky [ Peter Falk ], loves her deeply but doesn't understand her.

They're home and he has just yelled at her in front of some colleagues, who've fled. Now, as this husband and wife look at each other across their dining-room table, they struggle to push past the rancor and hurt.

But Mabel is struggling because her purchase on everyday life has begun to badly slip, bewildering them both. Her Love for Nicky and their children feels boundless, and it radiates off her like a fever,  but Mabel is headed for a breakdown.

As the two begin working it out, Cassavetes cuts between them, framing each in isolating close-up. At first, Nicky looks at her with a faint, inscrutable smile that Mabel doesn't return.

Instead, she stares at him and holds up a thumb, as if she were getting ready to hitch a ride, then she begins a strange pantomime. She screws her face into a scowl, waves her arms, mimes some words.

Rowland had an incredibly expressive, near-elastic face and equally extraordinary control of it, and the quicksilver shifts she uses here are unexpected and destabilizing; you want to keep watching but aren't sure you can.

The World Students Society thanks Manohla Dargis.