THE SCREEN: Tested Mettle
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
TESTED METTLE THE SCREEN For years Woody Allen 'has made comedies out of the same neuroses, anxiety and despair which are found in Ingmar Bergman's fi, hns. Now, w~th Interiors, Allen has made...
...Indeed, with material of this sort, maybe it is in the end an advanCage not ,to have quite so all-encompassing a formal and aesthetic vision as Bergman wou.l'd...
...This evanescence of the characters, as if each existed only inside the head of another, is hinted at again a few minutes later...
...and when we do see her, it looks as if Joey isn't there at all, inside the doors where we thought she was...
...There is another scene in which Eve is riding in a car with Joey, and rolls up the window...
...Eve is a decorator, and we are made acutely aware of the d6cor of all the exquisite rooms in which the film is set...
...I am referring to the fact that the interiors in this movie, besides being the in,terior experience of the characters, are the interiors of the rooms in which they live their lives...
...At the Commonweal: 631 heart of this film is the notion that a woman's children, having come literally from inside her body, remain in their emotions the visible interior of their mother...
...Is Joey only imagining her mother to be present, and in reality talking to herself...
...Ir is in moments like this that the true, sus,tained quality of the film lies...
...And while all this is going on out on the beach, Allen at two points cuts back to the remaining members of the family asleep in their beds inside...
...The sleepers don't come ~ully awake with some hokey premonition...
...Whenever anything goes wrong, Eve is likely to ask that the windows be closed because barely audible noises from the street outside are "unnerving...
...29 September 1978:632...
...Then, the first time she tries to kill herself, Allen opens the scene with close-ups of her hands as they tape the windows shu, t before turning on the gas...
...29 September 1978:630 Interiors ends in a situation very like the ending of Scenes, in fact (or like the ending of O'Neill's Long Day's 1our.ney into Night, which also has its obvious affinities with Bergman...
...When one member of the family attempts suicide, another nearly dies in the rescue effort...
...Their conflicts with each other are like the conflicted feelings inside some one person...
...The experiences that both directors try .to deal with---emotional experiences that 'have no obj~tive eontem, experiences that are purely, as Allen's title says, "interior".-are so elusive .that the more tentative art with which Allen approaches them comes nearer the .truth than does the completeness, the aesthetic elaboration, of a Bergman film...
...and the sound of the tape being unreeled truly is unnerving--sharp and distinct and louder than life...
...On this particular night he has remarried, with his daughters and their husbands in at_9 tendance...
...Woody Allen is a remarkable man...
...That's the whole scene, jus~ rolling up the window--a simple, natural gesture of selfimmurement...
...Whi'le Ren~ta (Diane Keaton) is asleep in bed during the suicide attempt, earlier she was out on the beach alone, staring miserably at the waves as if she might drown herself...
...Eve doesn't speak...
...He has been through psychoanalysis, which is one way, and he has been a nig.htelub monologist and director of schlock comedies, which are another way...
...The impli.ca.tion here is that the emotional connections among them are almost physiological...
...Again, though, what makes this movie compelling is the way Allen can use the same sort of material in a very low-key, almost incidental way...
...But Allen never shows us the two of them in the same shot...
...Or is it she who is the figment of Eve's imagination...
...Now, w~th Interiors, Allen has made a film .that Bergman might almost have made himself...
...Marshall), a wealthy lawyer who has recently left his wife Eve (Geraldine Page...
...It's a brilliant touch...
...After everyone else has gone to bed, the one daughter still up, Joey (Mary Beth Hurt), l~hinks she sees Eve, who was of course not invited, standing in the shadows on the veranda...
...What makes this momegt effective is that it is only a moment...
...He is a man who has tried a number of very radical ways to mediate feeling...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...This is what, in Interiors, adds a whole new dimension to his career...
...Allen has made a film which is perhaps even better than the film Bergman might have made from the same material, for while Allen is less powerful as an artist, he may also be more human...
...yet AHen has come through them with an extraordinary sense of how obs:ure and precarious true feeling is...
...Certainly Interiors is a film that works as drama at least as well and painfully s Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage did...
...These are both very rough ways to try to deal with feeling...
...It is only a fleeting glimpse of what lies beyond all explanation here, a whiff of the power feelings can have greater than even the suicide suggests...
...The truth is that the a~tempt of one member of the family to kill herself is a composite of the actions and reactions of all the other members...
...The only symbolization that the human condition gets here is so close to being literal, and not displaced or symbolic at all, .that it is a note as lightly played as the others I've beech talking about...
...They bestir themselves for the instant, and then lapse back into sleep...
...It is the momentariness of this crystallization of their feelings, its briefness and faintness, which makes it affecting...
...Everything that happens in the film has this tenuous web of connectedness to it...
...The effectiveness of ~his moment derives, too, from the fact that Allen has been making the suggestion contained in it all through the film, but making it always just as slightly and unobtrusively as here...
...From the unlighted sitting room, Joey begins to speak to her mother outside...
...The house, which is on the beach in the Hamptons, belongs to Arthur (E.G...
...At the moment when .the would-be rescuer is herself being revived, Arthur and the two daughters still in their beds stir into wakefulness briefly, emerging from sleep as those outside do from the ocean--as if the sea of troubles in which the family is really drowning is its own sleep and dreams...
...The cen:tral characters are together, yet utterly alone, in a dark house in the middle of the night...
Vol. 105 • September 1978 • No. 19
