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- <text id=92TT1953>
- <title>
- Aug. 31, 1992: And Now the Movie . . .
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1992
- Aug. 31, 1992 Woody Allen: Cries and Whispers
- </history>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- COVER STORIES, Page 56
- WOODY ALLEN
- And Now the Movie...</hdr><body>
- <p> Part of the great black swirl of gossip now encircling Woody
- Allen is the confident assertion that in his new movie,
- Husbands and Wives, Allen plays a college professor who makes
- love with a young woman student a third his age. And, oh, in
- Manhattan didn't he and Mariel Hemingway play a similarly
- mismatched couple? In Hannah and Her Sisters didn't he imagine
- an affair between a sister and one of her brothers-in-law? No
- one recalls that Manhattan's middle-aged male ended up miserably
- alone, and that the scandalous tryst in Hannah was not joyous
- or lasting. So the inference holds: that Allen's bad life is
- imitating his good art.
- </p>
- <p> But what Husbands and Wives really imitates is some of
- Allen's best work. A professor (Allen) is indeed attracted to
- one of his students (Juliette Lewis). But she is seen as a girl
- with a dangerous itch for older men, and though the teacher
- knows temptation, he faces it down.
- </p>
- <p> Anyway, this is not the film's central concern. Allen, his
- wife (Mia Farrow) and another couple are trying to live with
- the dulling compromises of long liaisons, yet also searching
- for sustaining warmth as the chill of the years settles on
- them. Trial separations, silly affairs, are the results, not the
- causes of their anguish.
- </p>
- <p> Perhaps by Sept. 23, the occasional uncomfortable
- parallels will have faded. And audiences will see that the
- film's deepest resonances are with Allen's most popular previous
- works: comedies of urban manners shadowed by his rueful
- recognition of those abiding sexual confusions that he has
- always observed with a unique blend of irony and compassion.
- </p>
- <p>By Richard Schickel
- </p>
-
- </body></article>
- </text>
-
-