Bergmania (Cont’d)

Something more needs to be said about Woody Allen’s disastrous Interiors, which I discussed at length last time. While the film purports to sound the deeper aspects of human misery, it is quite unable to handle narrative and psychology on their simplest levels. Thus Joey announces her pregnancy to her lover, Mike, and, over his weak protestations, seems to decide on an abortion. That is the last we hear of it, one way or the other. When Joey bemoans her lack of creativity, Mike suggests that she take up photography again, a suggestion she categorically rejects. Yet in a later scene we see Renata (Joey’s sister) and her husband looking at photographs Joey has submitted for their opinion. When Arthur, the girls’ father, arrives to introduce his future bride, Pearl, to the family, Renata sends her small daughter upstairs to play by herself. Ludicrous: any grandfather after a long absence would want to see his grandchild; but Allen clearly doesn’t know how to deal with children in a movie.

He is not much better with adults. Under no circumstances would Arthur get remarried at the beach house to which his suicidal ex-wife, Eve, has free access, and where she does show up with fatal consequences. Joey, however outspoken, would not say those crushing things to her mother on Arthur’s wedding day. And what kind of a political activist would live in the lap of bourgeois luxury at the expense of his girlfriend’s father? Yet that is what Mike does without a twinge of conscience, and without so much as a little reproach from Joey during their frequent fights. Interiors, which in one speech actually feels obliged to explain its own title, never quite discovers on which side of the epidermis to search for the soul.

JS

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John Simon

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Something more needs to be said about Woody Allen’s disastrous Interiors, which I discussed at length last time. While the film purports to sound the deeper aspects of human misery, it is quite unable to handle narrative and psychology on their simplest levels. Thus Joey announces her pregnancy to her lover, Mike, and, over his weak protestations, seems to decide on an abortion. That is the last we hear of it, one way or the other. When Joey bemoans her lack of creativity, Mike suggests that she take up photography again, a suggestion she categorically rejects. Yet in a later scene we see Renata (Joey’s sister) and her husband looking at photographs Joey has submitted for their opinion. When Arthur, the girls’ father, arrives to introduce his future bride, Pearl, to the family, Renata sends her small daughter upstairs to play by herself. Ludicrous: any grandfather after a long absence would want to see his grandchild; but Allen clearly doesn’t know how to deal with children in a movie.

He is not much better with adults. Under no circumstances would Arthur get remarried at the beach house to which his suicidal ex-wife, Eve, has free access, and where she does show up with fatal consequences. Joey, however outspoken, would not say those crushing things to her mother on Arthur’s wedding day. And what kind of a political activist would live in the lap of bourgeois luxury at the expense of his girlfriend’s father? Yet that is what Mike does without a twinge of conscience, and without so much as a little reproach from Joey during their frequent fights. Interiors, which in one speech actually feels obliged to explain its own title, never quite discovers on which side of the epidermis to search for the soul.