"You're such a perceptive woman. How can you not understand his feelings?"
- Marion's sister-in-law
A teenager will not understand much of what is happening to the 50-year-old characters in "Another Woman," if only because scattered emotions and repressed feelings over past relationships and failed marriages require almost a lifetime to gain any solid perspective. Any teenager watching this film will relate more closely to Martha Plimpton's teenage character than anyone else. I first saw "Another Woman" in late 1989 and I reacted to it as something that only adults could appreciate. I was swept in by it but I did not understand the fundamental problem of its main protagonist, Marion (Gena Rowlands), and that she's repressed and can only relate to intellectuals on her level. Well, I did not fully understand it but I had met people later in life who prided themselves on being intellectually superior - it was their mainstay and the jobs they held in universities as professors justified it. Essentially a prig, the word Gene Hackman's character uses in the film to describe Marion's husband. This may be read as a stereotype of a smarmy intellectual, a prig, but what resonates in "Another Woman" is that Marion slowly realizes the tragedy of her life and has to fix it...soon.
Gena Rowlands is pitch-perfect as the philosophy professor Marion, who sublets a flat in New York so she can write her new book. The problem is that the ventilation in the building allows her to hear a sobbing woman's therapy session. The woman is Hope (Mia Farrow) and she might be suicidal yet this takes a hold of Marion - she cannot help but be fascinated and intrigued in someone's private life. Marion starts to realize that she is questioning her own existence as a result, and everyone around her. She starts to see the seams of her rather aloof marriage to another intellectual, Ken, a physician (Ian Holm), or how she treated her brother (Harris Yulin) as an embarrassment and her criticisms of his attempts at writing, or her dear old father (John Houseman) and she imagines that maybe her own mother was not someone he loved too deeply. In some instances, Marion is imagining some of the scenarios and entering them as her 50-year-old self not unlike similar scenes from "Wild Strawberries" (Allen has always dealt with Ingmar Bergman's inventive flashbacks). Does this mean that some of the imagined scenarios are just that, or is it because Marion has found that deep emotions and deeper undercurrents of repressed emotions have been plaguing people in her own life and she never noticed? The look of the film has a brown, grayish palette as if any bright cheery colors have been sucked out of this world (lensed by Bergman's cinematographer, Sven Nykvist). It complements Marion's moods that veer subtly from repression to openly expressing her feelings.
There are two scenes of sustained intensity that feel invasive and honestly nail-biting. One involves Ken's ex-wife (a wickedly harsh cameo by Betty Buckley) who speaks bluntly on her husband's adulterous affair with Marion in front of their friends. Another involves Marion's old friend, Claire, a married theatre actress (Sandy Dennis, absolutely brilliant) whom she runs into and they have a drink. An awkward situation develops when Claire's husband is engaged in a conversation with Marion shutting out Claire. Claire then relays her feelings about Marion and how Marion always managed to swoon over her boyfriends.
Woody Allen's "Another Woman" feels more true, more optimistic, more nuanced than some of his prior serious dramatic efforts. Gena Rowlands encapsulates Marion to a tee, and just about every scene has Rowlands in it. It is her own point-of-view where bottled up emotions come to the surface recognizing that what is on the surface is not real. She can see how bottled up her husband is, who still cheats on her and can't spend time alone with her without friends. Her own intellectualism can be her own undoing and life can be disorganized, messy and out-of-control. Everyone else is going through a crisis and Marion would rather not be a part of it. She learns that you can't ignore it and the people in her family and her friends desire something more than knowing about philosophy, art, culture and the prose of Rilke. Most people need to feel, to love, to be human, to have children and don't need art and their own professions to shut themselves out of their existence. They don't want to be cold, stuffy, prigs or snobs. Hope gives Marion reason to rise like a phoenix and feel again.
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