The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen (36 page)

Husbands and Wives
is distinctive among Allen’s films for the extent to which its cinematography and scene construction reproduce the raw emotionality of the film’s plot and the bitter disjunctions which are its subject matter. As was suggested in the discussion of
Bullets Over Broadway,
Allen’s films are generally characterizable as “well-made” movies: their narrative devices (the use of voice-overs in
Annie Hall, Broadway Danny
Rose, and
Hannah and Her Sisters,
for example) tend to be transparent, undistracting (because their relationship to the plot is clearly specified), and purposeful, and however heated the emotional interiors of his movies, the presentation of scenes tends toward orderliness and coherence. Allen’s dependence upon master shots as opposed to editing reinforces his films’ aura of continuity, of cohesive seamlessness. (Given the general absence of visual innovation in his movies and his self-acknowledged debt to American playwrights, it seems not completely inappropriate to describe Allen as a naturalistic dramatist working in the medium of film.) The fact that Allen has used basically the same style of opening and closing tides since
Sleeper
epitomizes the overall consistency of his annual cinematic productions, the often bewildering narrative shifts of
Stardust Memories
representing the exception that proves the rule of his characteristic formal methodicalness and uniformity of scene sequencing and composition.
⁴
Their humor is undoubtedly the primary reason Allen’s films draw the audience they do, one fairly sizable in proportion to their production budgets; the clarity of dramatic presentation, visual precision, straightforward realism, and overall accessibility of his movies are other, not inconsiderable sources of their attractiveness.
⁵

With its neat chapter-by-chapter construction, punctilious interweaving of narratives and symmetry-favoring scene construction unusually brightly lit by Carlo Di Palma,
Hannah and Her Sisters
is, arguably, the quintessence of the Woody Allen well-made film. Consequently,
Hannah
is Allen’s oeuvre’s most extreme stylistic antithesis to
Husbands and Wives
.
⁶
In discussing
Husbands and Wives,
contrasts between these two films can be repeatedly invoked for two reasons: because
Husbands and Wives
so emphatically recants the commitments tentatively dramatized in
Hannah,
and because it is the stylistic virtues of
Hannah,
with their implied identification of artistic decorum with familial affirmation, that Allen sought to repudiate and subvert in making
Husbands and Wives
.

Allen explained to Stig Bjorkman the motivation underlying the deliberately uncentered cinematography of
Husbands and Wives
: “I’ve always been thinking that so much time is wasted and so much devoted to the prettiness of films and the delicacy and the precision. Pick up the camera, forget about the dolly, just hand-hold the thing and get what you can. And then, don’t worry about colour correcting it, don’t worry about mixing it so much, don’t worry about all the precision stuff and see what happens. When you feel like cutting, just cut. Don’t worry about that it’s going to jump or anything. Just do what you want, forget about anything but the content of the film. And that’s what I did.”
⁷

The opening titles of
Husbands and Wives
, scrolling over a remarkably lugubrious version of “What is This Thing Called Love?,”
⁸
reflect Allen’s trademark mode of introducing his films, but the scene which follows little resembles what we expect from a Woody Allen movie. Whereas camera movement in his films is normally stable, unintrusive, and “natural,” Carlo Di Palma’s camera in the opening scene seems to be attempting to reproduce Judy’s emotional response to the announcement by their closest friends, Sally (Judy Davis) and Jack (Sydney Pollack), of their separation: “I just feel shattered—I
do
”. Described by Allen as “fighting for its life to keep the characters in frame,”
⁹
the camera caroms uncertainly from one character to another as they bat the sad news back and forth among themselves, its framing eye seldom arriving on time to visualize the person speaking before it has to swivel off wildly in the direction of the next speaker. Often, the best it can do is to approximate the position of the speaker it strives to locate, the ill-composed images of the speaking characters, positioning them to the left or right of center of the frame, reflecting the fact that the scene—like many in the movie and practically all in life—had never been blocked.
¹⁰
In
Manhattan, Crimes and Misdemeanors,
and other films, Allen occasionally allows characters to walk out of scenes, the camera focusing on the background they’ve left as their dialogue continues. In the beginning of
Husbands and Wives
, the camera seems utterly helpless to keep up with the characters.’ movements, at one point losing Judy (Farrow) completely as she flees angrily for her bedroom, focusing pointlessly on a fireplace she’s passed before zooming clumsily in futile pursuit of her down the hallway she’s already vacated. (Gabe will have parallel difficulties staying with Judy toward the end of the film, ultimately losing her as completely as the camera does.) Compared to the more characteristic scene composition and camera movement of Allen’s productions, the opening scene
of Husbands and Wives
seems to have contracted delirium tremens, Di Palma’s handheld camera enacting its experience of free-floating anxiety and terminal loss of moorings as the characters vent to each other about their analogously dislocated psychic conditions.

The opening scene cuts to a medium close-up of Judy being asked a question by a male voice off-camera (Jeffrey Kurland, Allen’s longtime costume designer). She candidly answers his intimate question concerning the night of Jack and Sally’s revelation and waits unperturbed for his next inquiry. His cross-examinations continue with other characters sporadically throughout the film, and he becomes the narrator of significant passages of it as well. Since no attempt is made to establish whether this voice is a therapist, a sociologist, a documentary filmmaker, or what, the movies refusal to integrate this
cinema verit
é presence into the plot leaves that significant narrative dimension of the film gapingly open and ambiguous. Like the God whom Gabe, in the movie’s first line of dialogue, characterizes as not playing dice with the universe but who instead “just plays hide and seek” with it, this narrator/interlocutor is everywhere and nowhere in the film, human testimony to the triumph of the therapeutic, which
Husbands and Wives
continually dramatizes and tacitly laments.

As the movie continues, it gradually settles into a somewhat more conventional cinematographic mode, only in moments of emotional extremity reverting to the eccentric, anxiously decentered cinematic style in which it began. Nonetheless, its clear that in
Husbands and Wives
, Allen is deliberately jettisoning many of the techniques of narrative coherence and manifestations of “well-madeness” which he relies upon to focus and stabilize his other films.
¹¹
The raggedness of
Husbands and Wives’
pseudodocumentary
cinema verité style
effectively replicates the raggedness of the characters’ deeply ravaged interior lives while implicitly repudiating the actuality-distorting blandishments of dramatic construction which rounded off the rough edges of films like
Hannah
. Di Palma’s handheld camera’s conjuring of instabilty in the world of
Husbands and Wives
is the film’s most apparent technical decentering ploy, but the plot is equally permeated with misdirections and equivocations evocative of a humanly atomized reality.

One such plot element is introduced by Gabe’s comment to Judy after they’ve learned of the Sally and Jack separation: “You think you’re so friendly with people and so close, and then it turns out you have no idea what they’re thinking.” In confirmation of this comment, Allen’s script has Gabe tell Judy (and thus the viewer) what he knows about Jack’s extramarital meanderings preceding the separation. Acting on Jack’s confession that his marriage isn’t sexually fulfilling, a business associate of Jack’s (Bruce Jay Friedman) gave him the name of an expensive call girl, Gabe explains; resisting the temptation with difficulty, Gabe adds, Jack tore up her phone number. The film cuts from Gabe’s assertion of his friend’s incorruptibility to a young woman being interviewed by the film’s narrator/interrogator: she is the call girl to whom Jack actually made numerous visits, her revelations including the fact that she set Jack up with another call girl with whom he also had repeated assignations. The moral issues raised by the prostitute’s revelations are significant, especially in terms of their reflection on the likelihood of Sally and Jack’s film-closing reconciliation surviving their unresolved sexual problems and Jack’s philandering proclivities, but perhaps more important to the movie’s central themes is their exposure of Jack’s duplicity in his dealings with both Sally and Gabe.

“Do you ever hide things from me?” Judy asks Gabe after he tells her his version of Jack’s resistance of temptation, “—feelings, you know, longings, complaints?” Gabe responds in the negative, but in doing so he’s hiding things from her: as the documentarian’s interrogations of individual characters and the narrative’s dramatic scenes jointly confirm,
all
the characters in this movie conceal things from the others, clandestinely pursuing emotional and erotic agendas in violation of their moral and legal contracts. If
Husbands and Wives
validates any single assertion made during the Allen/Farrow contention, it’s Allen’s much-quoted self-justification, “The heart wants what it wants. There’s no logic to those things. You meet someone and you fall in love and that’s that.”
¹²

At the end of
Hannah and Her Sisters,
the human heart is affirmatively dramatized as a “resilient little muscle,” one capable of withstanding rejection and rising from it to sing the celebratory Cole Porter song that Holly and Mickey watch Bobby Short perform—“I’m in Love Again.” In
Husbands and Wives,
the heart is the repository of emotional and sexual inconstancy and concealment, its theme song the dourly interrogatory Cole Porter composition, “What is This Thing Called Love?”
¹³
Of Allen’s films, only
September
presents the human heart as being more disastrously subject to misguided romantic object choices and misplaced, self-destructive affections than does
Husbands and Wives
. Jack regularly visits prostitutes while secretly buying lingerie for someone other than Sally; despite (or because of) his knowledge of her “kamikaze woman” proclivities, Gabe is strongly attracted to Rain (Juliette Lewis), a student in his Columbia University fiction writing class; Judy “has feelings for” Michael (Liam Neeson), a co-worker to whom she has introduced Sally; Sally alone plays by the rules of monogamous fidelity, a circumstance attributable, it seems, to her sexual dysfunctionality. The more striking exception to the rule of human erotic inconstancy in
Husbands and Wives
is Rain’s parents, whose twenty-five years of marriage have resulted, apparently, in stability and happiness. Their example, however, hasn’t proved transferable to the next generation, the “kamikaze woman” of a daughter they’ve raised having, at the age of twenty-one, already experienced numerous fractious love affairs with men over fifty.
¹⁴
At the end of the film, Gabe and Judy are divorced, she having married Michael; Jack and Sally have successfully reconciled; and Gabe’s reward for terminating his embryonic affair with Rain is his relegation to solitude.
¹⁵
Like Nick Carraway, who concludes
The Great Gatsby
forswearing the “privileged glimpses into the human heart” which constitute his story, Gabe, having grown weary both of his erotic pursuits and of turning them into patently autobiographical fictional narratives, has abandoned his confessional novel in favor of a “more political” work of fiction—one assumedly less preoccupied with the human capacity to love.

“Maybe the poets are right,” Mickey Sachs muses in
Hannah and Her Sisters
, “maybe love is the only answer” (p. 109). The generically determined comedic/romantic ending of
Hannah
seems to confirm this judgment, since the film’s five major characters are all visually dramatized in attitudes of love achieved, revived, or recaptured in the movie’s radiant closing Thanksgiving scene. Members of the two couples reformed and dissolved in the course of
Husbands and Wives
are interviewed at the end of the film, their
cinema verit
é discourses upon love and marriage engendering more doubts about the solidity of erotic relationships than they resolve. Jack attributes his reunion with Sally—despite an unresolved sexual incompatibility—to the idea that “you can’t just wipe out years of closeness”; in their final dialogue together in the film, Gabe accordingly recalls for Judy two of their warmest moments of closeness: their decision to skip a Columbia faculty party and walk through a snowbound Central Park, and the night they watched
Wild Strawberries
together until dawn.
¹⁶
Judy’s response not only constitutes her refusal to be drawn into a nostalgia-inspired reconciliation with Gabe, but it also represents something approaching a recantation of the affirmation which proves provisionally redemptive in other Allen films. “All that stuff,” she objects, “those memories, they’re just memories, they’re just moments from years gone by. They’re isolated moments—they don’t tell the whole story.”