MURDER and murder

Doris is a part-time art teacher in her early sixties whose love life recently took a surprise sapphic turn. She’s about to move in with her first girlfriend, Mildred, a waspy, well-to-do academic ten years her junior, and the vicissitudes of their relationship are mused upon by a teenage Mildred and Doris’s mother, who playfully haunt the film as invisible onlookers. Rainer, looking snazzily butch in a tux, provides running commentary of her own as the director-emcee of this darkly comic meditation on aging, breast cancer, and lesbian romance. MURDER and murder, a movie by turns slapstick and sobering, would be Rainer’s last feature.