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It takes place in August, one joke in a spare handful. A Vermont cottage, bourgie sad-sacks under glass, quite the beige purgatory. The aspiring photographer (Mia Farrow) is still frayed from a suicide attempt, she dresses "like a Polish refugee" or rather like Liv Ullmann in Autumn Sonata. The bashful courting of the widowed neighbor (Denholm Elliott) goes unnoticed, her interest lies instead in the tenant (Sam Waterston) who carries a torch for her married friend (Dianne Wiest). Into the roundelay of unrequited love steamrolls the brassy materfamilias (Elaine Stritch), a former starlet coasting on the scandal that still traumatizes her daughter, mixing wisecracks and pensées: "You study your face in the mirror and realize something is missing. And then you realize, it's your future." (Not to be outdone, Jack Warden as the physicist she's married supplies the cosmic view: "Haphazard... morally neutral... and unimaginably violent.") A revision of Interiors and a variant of Hannah and Her Sisters, the most hermetic of Woody Allen's frigid hothouses. The blocked novelist writes Madison Avenue ads, cf. Conway's The Hucksters, the jealous rival pricks his concept of a book "about survival," "we already have the Boy Scout manual." Lightning flashes during a blackout, ambivalent monologues in half-silhouette. Lack of communication is the hobgoblin, Wiest won't let her radiologist husband take X-rays of her, Stritch would rather summon a dead lover via Ouija board than talk to her miserable offspring. "The whole is greater than the sum of the parts." "Said the bishop to the showgirl." The moral is to not waste an evening on dramatic revelations and clandestine kisses when you could have gone to a Kurosawa film. "We're all temperamental. Otherwise, we wouldn't be so fascinating." Allen shot the film twice and was eager for a third version, thus Another Woman. Cinematography by Carlo Di Palma.
--- Fernando F. Croce |