Waiting is what their bodies are doing — four women standing in a row against a lit theatre lobby in 1949, handbags clasped at the waist, faces turned in four different directions, none of them at each other. Three press close together; a fourth stands apart to the left, gloved hands folded over a dark purse. Behind them, larger than life, a film poster shows a woman at a telephone, and beside her the printed confession: "That night I spent my last nickel to call Steve... that I was... have a baby... without... goodbye."
Louis Faurer has let the advertised melodrama hang over the real women like a thought balloon they cannot see. The painted face whispers its scandal of last nickels and abandonment into the marcelled hair of the living, who wait below it in their good coats, composed, ordinary, carrying their own unspoken accounts. The lobby lights flare at the upper corners; a man in a suit lingers at the right edge, half in shadow, watching the street or watching them.
The picture's quiet cruelty is the gap between the poster's loud emotion and the women's withheld ones. We are told everything about the fictional woman and nothing about the four real ones, whose inner weather Faurer respects by leaving it sealed. They have come to be entertained by a story of a woman's worst night, and they stand beneath it patient and unreadable, each privately elsewhere, while the city sells grief by the ticket behind plate glass.
Waiting is what their bodies are doing — four women standing in a row against a lit theatre lobby in 1949, handbags clasped at the waist, faces turned in four different directions, none of them at each other. Three press close together; a fourth stands apart to the left, gloved hands folded over a dark purse. Behind them, larger than life, a film poster shows a woman at a telephone, and beside her the printed confession: "That night I spent my last nickel to call Steve... that I was... have a baby... without... goodbye."
Louis Faurer has let the advertised melodrama hang over the real women like a thought balloon they cannot see. The painted face whispers its scandal of last nickels and abandonment into the marcelled hair of the living, who wait below it in their good coats, composed, ordinary, carrying their own unspoken accounts. The lobby lights flare at the upper corners; a man in a suit lingers at the right edge, half in shadow, watching the street or watching them.
The picture's quiet cruelty is the gap between the poster's loud emotion and the women's withheld ones. We are told everything about the fictional woman and nothing about the four real ones, whose inner weather Faurer respects by leaving it sealed. They have come to be entertained by a story of a woman's worst night, and they stand beneath it patient and unreadable, each privately elsewhere, while the city sells grief by the ticket behind plate glass.