BEFORE: Woody Allen and Mia Farrow carry over from "Shadows and Fog" for their final collaboration. Since this film about breakups was edited and released during their actual breakup, I'm assuming that people watched this film very closely for insights into their personal life...
THE PLOT: When their best friends announce that they're separating, a professor and his wife discover the faults in their marriage.
AFTER: Full disclosure, I was once in a situation like this, near the end of my first marriage. Our closest married friends sat us down and told us they were separating, but they both wanted to stay friends with both of us. We were sad and confused and sorry for them, but in the end they worked out their issues and stayed together - but they had set in motion a chain of events that may have contributed to our own break-up. There were other issues, of course - but this situation rang really true for me.
Last year, I watched all of the James Bond films in a row, and it really highlighted the similarities of the films as a collective narrative. By the end of the chain, I just couldn't watch another madman try to take over the world by launching a satellite. My BFF Andy pointed out my mistake - you're simply not supposed to watch them all in a row, because that's not how they were made. With a two or three year gap between the release dates, that's the ideal way to watch them - one every three years. It's become sort of the same with Woody Allen, who has averaged about a film a year since the 1970's. They're probably best watched with a one-year gap in between, and now I realize my scheduling mistake once again.
As a result of watching them day after day, I keep seeing the same things over and over - upper-class Manhattanites, agonizing over their relationships and having affairs. Oh, there have been a couple of exceptions - a couple of the films have been set in San Francisco or Eastern Europe, but the general thrust is the same.
However, this film is set in a documentary style, which is something of a return to the format of "Take the Money and Run", only dramatic instead of comedic. But somehow without narrator, we can more easily accept an omniscient camera, which goes wherever it needs to and records whatever is relevant. But when we hear that voice - wait, who's narrating? And who's filming this? And why don't the people being filmed realize that they're being filmed - did they really not mind being filmed cheating on their spouses? And how did the film crew get footage of flashback events that happened years ago? Somehow the documentary format calls the whole process into question. It's an easy way to frame the narrative - one suspects that anything the director neglected to shoot or that somehow doesn't make sense in the editing room can be saved with a few lines of narration.
But let's get back to the story. Once again, it's Woody's fascination with the process of how lovers come together, separate, and then either come back together or find new lovers. Admittedly this is much more fascinating than watching people work, get fired and then find new jobs, but I still have to wonder why he's so obsessed with this process. Maybe because he's been through it so many times? They do always say, "Write what you know."
Speaking of writing, how many Woody Allen films feature a character who's a writer? Screenwriter, novel writer, it's all the same. People with writer's block, people who show their screenplays to each other as a form of intimacy, people who want to become writers - it's a common enough theme, and to his credit, he tends not to show people hammering away at a typewriter, even though he reportedly writes that way himself. "The Front", "Interiors", "Stardust Memories", "Another Woman", "September", and "Alice" all had characters who were writers, and of course this was central to "Hannah and Her Sisters" as well. Write what you know, even if that means writing about writing itself...
Also starring Sydney Pollack (last seen in "Changing Lanes"), Judy Davis (last seen in "Alice"), Liam Neeson (last seen in "Anchorman 2"), Juliette Lewis (last seen in "Natural Born Killers"), Ron Rifkin (last seen in "The Sum of All Fears"), Blythe Danner (also last seen in "Alice"), Lysette Anthony, with a cameo from Nora Ephron.
RATING: 5 out of 10 hedgehogs
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