Another Woman (1988) – Review by Pauline Kael

Not so long ago, Woody Allen movies were awaited with joy; then he began to make tasteful versions of Ingmar Bergman pictures. He has a new one, Another Woman, and—Well, I didn’t much care for Wild Strawberries the first time. (An homage, according to Peter Stone, is a plagiarism that your lawyer tells you is not actionable.) Cast in the Victor Sjöström role, Gena Rowlands is Marion, the cold, cerebral professor looking back over her life and realizing that she missed the boat: a fearful, prudent careerist, she lost out on passion, on motherhood, on life itself. (Does she also lack passion for her work? We’re not told, but it’s implied.)

The opening music, Satie’s “Gymnopédie No. 3,” is like the soothing Vangelis arrangements that are used in commercials for Gallo wines—music that’s selected because it couldn’t upset the most delicate sensibilities. (It has the qualities of a digestif.) The audience laughs, taking the wine-country connection to be a joke. It’s a jump ahead of Woody Allen, who must be so secluded from the world of commercials that he didn’t anticipate the reaction. He has become so conventional in his tastes that this genteel slumber-party music is his idea of an artistic prelude.

The story has a more intricate design than that of Allen’s Interiors or September. Just turned fifty, the firm-minded Marion, philosophy professor and director of undergraduate studies at “a fine women’s college,” has taken a year off to write a book and has sublet a second apartment, to work in. But “reality” leaks through: voices invade her sanctuary. They’re the voices of an analyst’s patients, coming through the air vent from the office next door. And she becomes obsessed with one voice—that of the tearful, distraught, and hugely pregnant Hope (Mia Farrow). Marion spies on her, follows her around Manhattan, and manages to meet her. Hope’s confused feelings awaken Marion to all the risk-taking she has put out of her orderly life: as if by magic, she begins to encounter people she used to know and to flash back to scenes from her past.

Woody Allen has become an accomplished craftsman, and he moves around a large group of Marion’s intertwined friends and relatives in the past and the present. The cast includes, among many others, Blythe Danner, Sandy Dennis, Martha Plimpton, Gene Hackman, Ian Holm, Harris Yulin, Philip Bosco, Kenneth Welsh, Bruce Jay Friedman, and John Houseman and David Ogden Stiers playing Marion’s father in his later years and when she was still a young woman. (Stiers’ voice matches up with Houseman’s.) Every detail is in place, from Sven Nykvist’s pristine, mellow images to Gena Rowlands’ designer writing ensembles and her distinguished-woman hairdo—the braided knot on the back of her head looks as if it had been cast in bronze. And Marion’s voice-overs keep briefing us. The movie is so lucidly constructed it’s like a diagram of all the characters’ relations to each other. It’s fluid even during Allen’s flourishes—when, for example, the older Marion talks across time to her brother Paul as a young man, or when Marion dreams that she’s at the rehearsal of a play about her life. The basic units, though, are Bergman scenes: Marion’s aged father expresses regret that his wife was not the woman he loved most deeply, and remorse at how he treated Marion and her brother; there’s speculation about whether Marion’s first husband committed suicide; Marion’s second husband’s first wife interrupts a party to denounce him; Marion wants to know why she and this second husband don’t have sex anymore; and so on. And Marion’s wet, suffering eyes speak of her misery over what she now recognizes has been a sterile existence, in which she has been judgmental about everyone but herself. (She is psychoanalyzed by overhearing the pregnant woman on the analyst’s couch.)

Quiet as it is, this is a soaringly ambitious movie; it’s clearly intended as a celebration of Allen’s becoming a father (it’s his child that Mia Farrow is carrying) and as an assertion of a new commitment to life, in all its passionate messiness. Yet, except for a few scenes where the performers’ individuality stirs the surface (Hackman, in tip-top form, sneaks in a hint of eroticism; Sandy Dennis lets loose with bursts of smudgy, chaotic anger; Martha Plimpton has her laconic, easygoing freshness; and Blythe Danner hugs herself, wrapping her long fingers around her skinniness like an American Maggie Smith), nothing in the movie has the slightest resonance. Bergman’s version had at least a mysterious sensuality and raw, gothic images and great disturbing faces that helped you over the banalities and stayed in the memory. Woody Allen’s picture is meant to be about emotion, but it has no emotion. It’s smooth and high-toned; it’s polished in its nothingness.

When Marion, upset, sits down alone and, in voice-over, tells us, “I thumbed through my mother’s edition of Rilke,” what universe are we in? (One where this isn’t recognized as a line to hoot at.) Woody Allen may identify with Marion’s new desire for release, but he’s filming a delusionary world derived from books, plays, and movies, where stick figures accuse each other of betrayals, infidelities, lack of courage—and it’s all weightless. Marion talks of Rilke’s black panther, his symbol of death; and a white mask is displayed—we’re told it’s from a performance of La Gioconda. The pregnant woman is named Hope, which is also the title of a Klimt painting of a pregnant nude exhibited for us; Brecht is referred to, and Kurt Weill is performed in an enervated version. Marion, who has been in love with order but realizes it’s death and now finds Hope, belongs to a whole race of cultured zombies.

This is the seventeenth film that Woody Allen (in his early fifties now) has written and directed; it’s easy to believe that, like Marion, he has trained himself to be overdisciplined. The evidence is here in this howlingly groomed production, which is intended to represent a movement toward liberation but was made by a man who doesn’t even accept his own humor. A viewer of all Woody Allen’s movies—the comedies and the vacuous dramas—may conclude that he misstates his problem in Another Woman. You can see in his comedies that he associates messy emotions with Jewishness and foolishness and laughter. But he wants to escape all that and be a “serious” dignified artist, so he sets his dramas in an austere Gentile world. And then what is the protagonist’s tight-nostrilled anguish about? Being repressed. Being a perfectionist. Not being emotional enough. That was the interior-decorator mother’s soul-sickness in Interiors, and it’s Marion’s soul-sickness here. Woody Allen is caught in his own Catch-22: his protagonist’s problem is not being Jewish.

Another Woman was made by an upscale control freak. Even the workplace Marion sublets is in impeccable taste. The soundtrack music is Bach and Mahler with popular classics in arrangements that seem modulated to go with the carpeting. The only bright side to all this is that, having reached a peak of self-rejection, Allen shouldn’t need to go any further in this direction. If there’s a tragic waste in his career, it’s that he doesn’t place a high enough value on his own talent; he labors to be an artist like Bergman and turns into a pseud. If he could just stop dichotomizing himself between “funny” Allen and “serious” Allen! Maybe even Marion would recognize that life includes cracking a joke now and then, and letting in a little rock ‘n’ roll. How can you embrace life and leave out all the good vulgar trashiness?