The Mirror and the Scene

1. Another Woman (1988) 

 

 

"I wondered if a memory is something you have or something you've lost" 

Anyone who appreciates the films of Woody Allen is likely to include Manhattan, Hannah And Her Sisters and Annie Hall in their list of his best films. Over the next few weeks I'd like to suggest some more unlikely candidates, starting this week with Another Woman and following with one or two controversial choices.

Another Woman is a bit of a departure for Woody Allen, it's a quiet and thoughtful musing on love and regret in late middle-age. Perhaps Allen was reading Proust and thinking about Ingmar Bergman. Bergman's long-time collaborator Sven Nykvist is the cinematographer here. To an extent Allen's own stylistic voice is somewhat muted, although usual themes of love and neurosis are present; comedy is not the prevalent driving force here. Some will find the film deeply moving others may even find it boring for the same reasons. It is not one of Allen's better known works but it features a masterfully understated Gina Rowlands (best known for her work with John Cassavettes) and a sad, dreamy and watery-eyed Mia Farrow.

Rowlands plays the part of Marion Post a university professor who rents an apartment adjoining a psychiatrists office while working on a new book. She overhears a session in the psychiatrists office with a heavily pregnant and suicidal woman, Hope (Mia Farrow) and is drawn to the woman's story.

She becomes something of a voyeur initially but then begins to reflect on her own life, her marriage to Ken (Ian Holm) and another earlier love interest, novelist Larry (Gene Hackman). The conversations she overhears help reveal to her the cognitive dissonance she has lived with many years, the denials she has sheltered and the illusions she has fostered. She comes to realise that apart from her step-daughter who idolises her, she has both knowingly and unknowingly manipulated and hurt many of those close to her, and is seen by those in her periphery as often quite calculated.

Rowlands reminds me of a combination of characters, Ellen Burstyn in Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore and for some reason Liv Ullman. Perhaps it's the Bergman influence. Rowlands was not the original choice for the lead part and although she is more well known for playing manically intense psychologically driven characters in her husband John Cassavette's films, here she gives one of the performance of her career, quiet and understated.

"For here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life. "

 In one of the best scenes in the film, Marion reads Rilke's 'Archaic Torso of Apollo' from a book of poetry her mother once owned. She finds the line "you must change your life" underlined and her mothers teardrops staining the page. It underlines the film also.

Another Woman is an example of life as deception, that to go on living we must deceive ourselves on more than one level and that some of us have a larger capacity to do this than others. Sometimes we awake from these little deceptions, sometimes it takes a great trauma or event for us to awake from the greater deceptions and sometimes the mirror of someone else's life is enough.