“Yvonne Rainer's new film The Man Who Envied Women is the story of Jack Deller, a professor of Foucauldian and Lacanian theory, whose wife of four years has just left him. And yet, as with all of Rainer's films, a simple plot description does not suffice, for her films are also ‘about' narrative and film structure. Reversing Hollywood convention whereby women are ‘to be looked at' and men heard, here the man is represented on the visual track and the woman on the sound track. The disjunction between sound and image, emphasizing the disjunction in their marriage as well as in each of their lives, is a continuation of Rainer's concern with contradictions and juxtapositions: between emotional and intellectual life, personal and historical processes, and social and sexual expectations. All of this emerges in a film replete with images of everyday life: while the husband, on the image track, pursues his routine (which includes psychotherapy), on the voice track his artist-wife, having recently turned fifty, reflects on the implications of menopause on her daily existence. Rainer's film structure reflects her multiple concerns; she interweaves fiction and documentary, narrative and theory, but always with an emphasis on portraying personal experience.” Kathy Geritz. (Note: The Man Who Envied Women will also be shown at the Roxie Cinema, S.F., co-sponsored by the S.F. Cinematheque, October 23-25.)