Books, Arts & Manners: Long Faces

You’ve got to hand it to Woody Allen: the man certainly has a rich fantasy life. In all his later, more grandiose movies, he fantasizes himself into some great director or playwright before him. Most obviously, he was Bergman in Interiors and Fellini in Stardust Memories. In A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy, he thought he was Jean Renoir; in Radio Days, he was trying for Neil Simon, and for once—unfortunately—succeeding. Now, in September, he is being Chekhov, God save the mark, but a Chekhov without a trace of humor, self-irony, true humanity.

We are in Lane’s house in Vermont at the end of August, which is why the film is called September. Lane— but why call these characters, threadbare to the point of transparence, by any but their interpreters’ names? Mia Farrow, then, is about to sell this family house full of old and new unhappy memories—she has just recovered from a nervous breakdown—and start a new life on the proceeds, as a photographer in New York (shades of Interiors, here as elsewhere). She is gently avoiding the amorous advances of a much older neighbor, Denholm Elliott, a professor of French, which sets the tone for various characters’ yearning for Paris, here functioning as Chekhov’s Moscow. Mia is desperately in love with Sam Waterston, an advertising man and summer boarder trying to write a book about his father, a history professor who came to grief during the McCarthy era.

You’ve got to hand it to Woody Allen: the man certainly has a rich fantasy life. In all his later, more grandiose movies, he fantasizes himself into some great director or playwright before him. Most obviously, he was Bergman in Interiors and Fellini in Stardust Memories. In A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy, he thought he was Jean Renoir; in Radio Days, he was trying for Neil Simon, and for once—unfortunately—succeeding. Now, in September, he is being Chekhov, God save the mark, but a Chekhov without a trace of humor, self-irony, true humanity.

We are in Lane’s house in Vermont at the end of August, which is why the film is called September. Lane— but why call these characters, threadbare to the point of transparence, by any but their interpreters’ names? Mia Farrow, then, is about to sell this family house full of old and new unhappy memories—she has just recovered from a nervous breakdown—and start a new life on the proceeds, as a photographer in New York (shades of Interiors, here as elsewhere). She is gently avoiding the amorous advances of a much older neighbor, Denholm Elliott, a professor of French, which sets the tone for various characters’ yearning for Paris, here functioning as Chekhov’s Moscow. Mia is desperately in love with Sam Waterston, an advertising man and summer boarder trying to write a book about his father, a history professor who came to grief during the McCarthy era.