Woody Allen began the 1990s with Alice (1990), a fantasy focusing on Mia Farrow's Alice, a bored, repressed, society woman. Trapped in a stale marriage, lusting after a neighbour, and longing for the freedom of an earlier romance with the now deceased Ed, Alice is hypnotised by her chiropractor into letting loose and following her dreams.
Not the same critical success which Allen had become accustomed to throughout the 1980s, Alice was more lightweight than his recent work. With names such as Farrow, Alec Baldwin and Cybill Shepherd involved, the film raked in $7million in the United States, a sound achievement due to several rewrites from the director throughout shooting.
Allen followed Alice with Shadows And Fog (1991), a visually experimental film. Loosely based in the work of German Expressionism, Shadows And Fog sees Allen allow his camera more movement than in his previous work, and is one of his most ambitiously shot films. Darkly comic in places, the film was hard to label, and fared less well than Allen's recent movies.
Husbands And Wives
Having experimented with camerawork in Shadows And Fog, ensemble writing in Hannah And Her Sisters and documentary-style structures with Zelig, Allen combined all these aspects for 1992's Husbands And Wives.
Focusing on the crumbling marriages of Gabe and Judy Roth (Allen and Farrow), and Jack and Sally (Sydney Pollack and Judy Davis) Husbands And Wives paints a stark portrayal of relationships, and the moments which defeat them. The adults are shown in all their insecure, immature, and fearful reality, providing an at-times comical, mostly thoughtful, reflection of mid-life worries.
With excellent performances by the couples, along with equally exemplary work from Liam Neeson and Juliette Lewis as Judy and Gabe's temptations, the confessional tone of the film is aided by occasional talking heads, in which the characters recount the events of the film to an interviewer.
A confident statement of Allen's abilities with narrative and style, Husbands And Wives proved his last film with Mia Farrow.
Mia Farrow
After their decade-plus relationship came to an end in a very public and bitter way, Woody Allen and Mia Farrow's working relationship was beyond repair. A crucial part of Allen's confident, thoughtful, personal films of the 1980s, Farrow's acting skills provided the backbone of some of Allen's best work, and he despite several actresses appearing in several of his films, he has never found a stalwart, as he had in the 70s with Diane Keaton and 80s with Farrow.
With the public very vocally critical of Allen and the manner of his break-up, he moved away from the introspective, adult themes which had characterised the majority of his work since 1977, and returned to lighter, more explicitly comedic writing.
Wishing to continue working amongst the media furor which had begun to engulf him, Allen set about exhuming the murder mystery idea which had originally been the structure of Annie Hall. This kick-started a series of comedies which only touched on the themes he had become accustomed to, only returning to such ideas as the decade closed.
Karl Keely - Karl has been writing for several years now despite his youth, and has produced material for a variety of sources. His largest recent ...
