Cinema: Other Voices, Other Rooms

ANOTHER WOMAN Directed and Written by Woody Allen

A woman sublets an apartment. Because of an architectural quirk, she discovers she can overhear her neighbor’s conversations. Since he is a ( psychiatrist, she finds herself eavesdropping, against her will, on the high, mysterious emotions pouring forth from his consulting room.

There are several ways to go with that situation. An old-time Hollywood screenwriting team might have used it for romantic comedy; there is a “cute meet” lurking in it. Hitchcock might have found in it the premise for suspense; it blends the quotidian and the voyeuristic in a way he would have liked. The young Woody Allen might even have made a farce of it.

But Another Woman is the work of the mature Allen, who has aspired to Bergmanesque seriousness and, after Interiors and September, has finally achieved it. His film is a variation on the master’s masterpiece, Persona, but it has what Allen’s other emulative exercises lacked, namely wit. Not that there are laugh lines in Another Woman. But the subtlety of its structure and the tender irony with which it contemplates an emotionally guarded woman being drawn into confrontation with her past demonstrate lucidity and compassion of an order virtually unknown in American movies.

Marion (played by Gena Rowlands in a clear, precise, controlled performance) is a woman who has willed the emotional confusion out of her life. A philosopher (she has taken this second apartment as a quiet place to write a book), she is married to a prosperous surgeon who makes no unreasonable demands on her time or emotions. Why then is she drawn to a particular voice from the next room? Probably because change has opened a breach in her defenses, and she recognizes in the speaker a voice she long ago stilled in herself. Actually it belongs to a woman called Hope (Mia Farrow), great with child, great with inchoate dreams and feelings too. Curiosity leads to obsession; soon Marion is following Hope in the streets, even making friends with her.

In pursuing Hope, Marion is, of course, also seeking self-knowledge. For this woman is her obverse double, embracing the mess and confusion Marion has spent her life avoiding. We never learn what troubles Hope. She is more device than character. But the chase diverts Marion still further from her habitual paths, opening her to chance encounters with figures from her past, who in turn trigger memories and fantasies that make her see how she has ducked life’s embrace. She has turned a best friend into a bitterly disappointed acquaintance; pregnancy into abortion; what might have been a passionate, lifesaving affair into an occasion for romantic rue.

The elegant assurance of Allen’s transitions in time and the perfection of an ensemble cast (special mention to Gene Hackman as the rejected lover) are admirable. They enrich the hypnotic power with which a complex movie explores that inevitable mid-life moment when we must count the costs not of our incautions, but of our cautions.