Another
Woman
Director: Woody Allen. Cast: Gena Rowlands, Ian Holm, Mia Farrow, Gene Hackman, Blythe Danner, Sandy Dennis, Martha Plimpton, Harris Yulin, David Ogden Stiers, John Houseman, Betty Buckley, Philip Bosco. Screenplay: Woody Allen.
I'm sure that by now Woody Allen accepts that his comic reputation will forever prevent his dramatic work from generating any attention. For that matter, even Woody's comedies do so little business anymore that he can't be too choosy about which projects garner the public's attention, so long as some of them do. You don't realize how much we lose by hanging this director out to dry until you see a film like Another Woman, which, commercially ignored and critically unheralded even by Allen's own falling standards, stands nonetheless as a sensitive, accomplished, and ambitious picture that deserves notice.
Yes, as in many of his more serious-minded pictures, Allen reveals here such an intense infatuation with All Things Bergman that his own voice comes close to vanishing; Another Woman is, like Deconstructing Harry after it, essentially Allen's attempt to recast Wild Strawberries around his own set of neuroses, though in this case at least he does not make the redundant error of casting himself in the lead role. Given his notorious bent toward self-laceration, both in his humor and his melancholy, Another Woman occasionally appraises its protagonist more harshly than it needs to. In fact, one might cringe at how harshly the picture treats its heroine if a) anyone had seen this movie, or b) if Marion Post, the philosophy professor played by Gena Rowlands, were not so clearly written as a stand-in for Allen
himself. For some reason, we allow Allen the full range of his hostility and disillusionment so long as they are directed at his own cowering, nervous frame. Then again, maybe we are ready to accept anything from a film that courteously furnishes itself with personality,
insight, and a point of view, three qualities which almost all films require but fewer and fewer seem capable of achieving. For the story of a woman who perceives herself as a failure, that's surely a hell of an accomplishment.
Marion, like most of Allen's subjects, has all the accoutrements of a perfect, carefree life. She has a solid professional reputation, a stable marriage, and enough money that, when she wishes to attain more private space for her writing, she can rent an apartment downtown for the sole purpose of providing a creative, unobstructed environment.
As with most perfect surfaces, however, Marion's life has plenty of compromises and blemishes that she not only fails to acknowledge, she often seems to have genuinely forgotten them, or worse, to have never realized they existed. Her life is a deceptively sturdy-seeming thing built over a vast webbing of fissures and faultlines of which she remains blithely unaware. Ironically, Marion does not begin to examine the ways in which she has pained or neglected other people until, because of idiosyncratic New York ventilation systems, she finds in her newly-rented writing studio that she can hear distinctly the confidential confessions from the office of the psychiatrist next door. With unsubtle but effective symbolism, Allen begins Marion's journey of self-scrutiny at the moment when she believes she has officially, happily installed herself in a solitary, impenetrable space.
The voice Marion hears is that of Mia Farrow, cast here as a woman describing to her psychiatrist the almost ineffable "anguish" she feels every day. Marion's first reaction is to be grateful that she herself feels nothing like this woman's sorrow, but little time passes—literally, since the film is only 81 minutes long—before she recognizes her complacency and starts to sense the sadness in her own life. Her marriage, to the
always-welcome Ian Holm, has grown passionless and frighteningly uncommunicative. She is bored with her friends, most of whom are in turn quite frustrated with her. A chance encounter with the closest friend of her youth, perfectly played by the brilliant Sandy Dennis, disintegrates into a protracted revelation of old resentments: news to Rowlands, but unforgettable and unforgivable to Dennis.
Doesn't anyone like Marion Post? Her stepdaughter, played by Martha Plimpton, idolizes her, but in the starstruck manner of the youthful pupil who ignores her teacher-hero's less flattering traits. Allen at least scripts a nice moment when, while dining out with friends, Marion receives an unexpected tribute of thanks and admiration from a former student. Still, none of the people who have real access into or specific roles within Rowlands' life are nearly as fond of her or impressed by her as are these comparative strangers. The feigned pleasantness of Rowlands' friends and family is explicitly theatricalized in a dream sequence where her friends are all actors in a long performance, their niceties dutifully recited, their criticisms spoken with real conviction. The scene has particular sting because Marion also comes to see herself as a sort of actress, putting forth false fronts to her friends and hiding herself in academic abstracts. For the first time, she realizes how many people in her circle harbor the same muted but nagging contempt for her that she feels for them.
Though Marion's revelations are nasty, the film neither bores nor abrades, largely due to the focused work by everyone before and behind the camera. Rowlands, who made her biggest impression playing heartbreaking nutcases in her husband's films (A Woman Under the Influence, Love Streams, Opening Night), ably communicates a different kind of mental illness in this movie: the bewilderment of a woman who relies too much on her mind and her reason. Smart and economical in all of her work, Rowlands is strikingly well-cast as Marion and finds unexpected ways of drawing our sympathy, particularly with so much of the film aligned against her. She also provides a summary retort to detractors who believed the extravagant loopiness of her performances for Cassavetes to originate from some inherent shakiness in Rowlands' own psychic state.
Mia Farrow, as the patient Marion hears through the wall and eventually meets, and
Gene Hackman, as an ex-lover who includes a Marion-like figure in one of his novels, are the other top-billed stars of Another Woman, but truth be told, neither has very much to do. Like Dennis, Holm, and the other conspicuously talented members of the cast, they effectively convey their characters' emotions without intruding much upon Rowlands' position at the center of every scene. By focusing so tightly on her and frequently incorporating her voice-over narration, the film intentionally and articulately approximates the solipsistic tendencies of Marion herself. The clarity with which Allen inhabits and expresses Marion's self-absorbed perspective on the world suggest again how fully Allen identifies with his protagonist. Surely only a filmmaker who understands Marion's predicament, even relates to it, could conjure that predicament with such precision.
So who, in the end, is the "other woman" pointed to in the film's title? Farrow, as the catalyst for Rowlands' own internal odyssey, seems like an obvious candidate, and another character assumes the status of adulterous rival that the label "another woman" most often connotes. All of these interpretations are worthy, but as the story of a woman who makes such shocking realizations about her self and her behavior, the other woman seems most fully to be Rowlands herself, who has started to realize how different she has become from the person she used to be, and the person she thought she still was.
Another Woman is the product of that "other" Woody Allen, the one whose dramas are often piercing and unhappy in ways that can upset fans of his buoyant comedies. However, as landmark Allen achievements like Hannah and Her Sisters and Manhattan demonstrate, even his ostensible comedies often come laced with enough drama and darkness that one should not mistake the more overt seriousness of films like Another Woman as a pretentious suppression of natural clownishness. Bergman's influence, not only on story and character but even within Allen's crew—the
Swede's longtime cinematographer Sven Nykvist shows up here as Allen's collaborator, as he did in the following year's Crimes and Misdemeanors—affects the film much as Farrow's character influences Rowlands' within the film: Bergman's example provides the inspiration and groundwork for Allen's exploration, but nonetheless, like Rowlands', Allen's journey here is distinctly and unmistakably his own. A–