Eva, een huismoeder met een fantasieloze echtgenoot, komt tot de ontdekking dat ze haar leven anders wil leiden dan ze tot nu toe gedaan heeft. Ze wil haar leven en liefde delen met een vrouw.
EN
“In Een Vrouw als Eva, the husband seems generous and open-minded, at least at first: if his wife feels depressed, she deserves a holiday, and he tells her he will take care of the household. The problem, however, is that he expects Eefje to return as her ‘old self’. As Liliane’s lover, however, she wants to explore a new-found freedom, and the more her immediate surroundings attempt to confine her desires, the more stubborn Eva becomes in pursuing her personal happiness.”
Peter Verstraten1
“Both Een Vrouw als Eva (Nouchka van Brakel, 1979) and Twee Vrouwen (George Sluizer, 1979) were about a lesbian relationship, but they were criticized by feminists for not being radical enough. It had been unacceptable for them that Eva was played by Monique van de Ven, who was not a lesbian herself. No, Van de Ven riposted, that is right, but as she said with a streak of irony, in Turks fruit, she had played a woman with cancer while she did not suffer from the illness herself.”
Peter Verstraten2
“Maria Schneider was attracted to the film because it was written and directed by women, having endured humiliating experiences working for male filmmakers such as Antonioni and Bertolucci, most infamously while making Last Tango In Paris. The role was a natural fit for an openly bisexual woman who had enjoyed a bohemian lifestyle similar to Liliana’s while spending time living nomadically around Europe after being ostracised from Hollywood due to her erratic behaviour.”
James Gent3
“It was not until the 1980s that presenting a lesbian relationship in a popular film became even marginally accepted. The controversy caused by Een Vrouw als Eva (A Woman like Eve, Nouchka Van Brakel, 1979), another film with a lesbian theme from the same year, was a reminder of how sensitive such issues still were in Dutch society.”
Hans Van Driel4
“If Lianna presents its main character as a woman who appears suspended in time and space, an earlier film, A Woman like Eve, provides a significant alternative. Based on a screenplay by Nouchka van Brakel and filmed with a largely female crew, this Dutch film dramatizes the changes in a woman's life when she decides to leave her husband and becomes the lover of a French lesbian living in a commune. In one sense, A Woman like Eve faces the same criticism as does Lianna in that the basis for the women's relation seems to lack emotional depth. However, A Woman like Eve deals with the external realities of a lesbian relation very differently. A Woman like Eve is very much a film made from a woman's perspective and directed to a women's audience.”
Lisa DiCaprio5
- 1Peter Verstraten, Dutch Post-War Fiction Film through a Lens of Psychoanalysis (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021), 235.
- 2Peter Verstraten, Humour and Irony in Dutch Post-War Fiction Film (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016), 205.
- 3James Gent, “A Woman Like Eve,” We Are Cult, 21 April 2021.
- 4Hans Van Driel, “Twee vrouwen [Twice a Woman],” in The Cinema of the Low Countries, ed. Ernest Mathijs. (New York: Wallflower Press, 2004), 155.
- 5Lisa DiCaprio, “Lianna: Liberal Lesbianism,” Jump Cut 29 (February 1984): 45.
