Another Woman

Another Woman

Film is the most voyeuristic medium, but rarely does this fact strike me as forcefully as when I’m watching “Another Woman” by Woody Allen. Almost every scene in this movie should be private. Sometimes characters in the movie invade privacy. Other times, we invade theirs. And the main character is our partner in crime, standing next to us, whispering in our ear about what she’s been through.

This woman’s name is Marion Post (Gena Rowlands), and she looks like the kind of person who could tell you how to straighten out your life by “balancing” home, job, spouse and friends. She is extremely self-contained, well-organized, sane, efficient and intelligent. “Another Woman” is about the emotional compromises she has made to deserve that description.

She heads a university philosophy department. She is married to a doctor; they have no children but get along well with his teenage daughter by an earlier marriage. Her clothes are so right they’re almost invisible.

She’s writing a book; her voice-over narration describes some of these details and chronicles her life with a dry detachment that sometimes suggests there may be something she isn’t telling us.

The office is in one of those older downtown buildings with a ventilation system that carries sound between rooms without benefit of duct work. Sitting at her desk one day, Marion discovers that if she leans forward and strains just so, she can hear every word of a therapy session going on in the psychiatrist’s office next door. At first she blocks it out by stuffing pillows against the outlet for the vent pipe; then, frankly, she starts to listen.

While he sets up this device of overheard conversations not only can Marion eavesdrop on them (and we can eavesdrop on them), but when they stuff pillows against the air shaft every word will be blotted out completely Allen does an interesting thing: The choice to listen or not to listen is made so sharply, it’s unreal. It’s too clean, total, final.

Most of the scenes in “Another Woman” are clearly realistic. But I think Allen signals that the office can (also?) be taken as symbolical say, as the orderly interior of Marion’s mind. And that the cries coming through the grillwork on the wall are real emotions she has shut out for years; they’re her nightmares.

Over the next few weeks, Marion will see the walls come tumbling down. She will find out that she scares people and they don’t love her as much as she thought or trust her with their secrets; that she knows little about her husband or about herself; why she married this cold, unfaithful doctor instead of some other man who was really in love with her.

The film “Another Woman” is very much like Ingmar Bergman’s “Wild Strawberries,” in which an aged doctor wakes from a nightmare and goes on a journey. Among other things, he finds that his family doesn’t love him as unconditionally as he had thought; that his ‘sternness’ has been mistaken for efficiency; and that he should have accepted passionate love when it was offered to him.

This is not a remake of Bergman’s story, but it deals with the same idea: an introspective person discovering she might have gained from being less introverted.

It would be tempting to say that Rowlands has never been this good before. But the truth is that she always acts this well for example in some of her husband John Cassavetes’ films. However, what is different about her performance here is not just how good it is but also its emotional coloration. Sometimes great directors find common emotional ground with their actors, so that they become instruments playing different parts of one tune.

Cassavetes was wild and tumultuous; insecure yet passionate; emotionally disorganized all those things described by the adjective ‘crazy.’ And when he made movies with Gena Rowlands, she played women who seemed ready either to break down or to stampede at any moment women whose eyes were white except for a rim around the outside.

Allen, on the other hand, is thoughtful, apologetic intelligent formidable controlling through thoughts and words instead of physicality or temperament kind of guy you know? And now Rowlands mirrors this personality too; thereby showing us once more (or perhaps for real this time) how much those performances for Cassavetes really were ‘acting’ rather than representing any actual people. So if you want to know what Mia Farrow was talking about when she called Gena Rowlands “the greatest actress in the world” see “Another Woman.”

I don’t want to say too much about the story, so I’d better not.

“Another Woman,” more than most thrillers, depends on what we gradually learn. There are some false alarms along the way: for one thing, when Mia Farrow’s character a patient in the psychiatrist’s office next door to Rowlands’ turns up at the same bakery or bookstore or whatever it is Rowlands goes to every day (I forget). But nothing comes of it; and I think that’s because she has suppressed everything inside herself that could connect with this weeping, pregnant other woman.

A different woman is also present in the motion picture, along with a very dry and proper acting performance by Ian Holm as a man who needs to have a wife so that he can cheat on her. The earlier lover whose passion was spurned by Marion is played by Gene Hackman exactly as one would imagine him; and another of Martha Plimpton’s brilliant but somehow sad teenagers shows up too.

The single most effective scene in the movie involves Betty Buckley as Holm’s first wife, who turns up unexpectedly at a social event and acts “inappropriately” while Holm tries to make her vanish (this sequence is so painfully accurate about how we handle social embarrassments that it feels like rubbing salt into an open wound.)

The death of John Houseman gives poignancy to his appearance as Marion’s father here, Houseman finally let go all pretense at robust immortality and allowed himself to be seen as old, weak, spotty with great authority. (David Ogden Stiers does an amazing young Houseman double in one scene with the character.)

Another Woman ends rather abruptly I expected another chapter; yet I wouldn’t have wanted this material wrapped up neatly because what we find out about Marion Post is that she has wrapped herself so tightly nobody may ever live long enough to unpack it. But at least she starts remembering what she put away so carefully many years ago before this film is over.

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