***½/**** Image A Sound C+
starring Woody Allen, Blythe Danner, Judy Davis, Mia Farrow
written and directed by Woody Allen
by Bill Chambers Husbands and Wives is a rawer tapestry of couples in flux from Woody Allen than his paternalistic Hannah and Her Sisters. It's reasonable to consider this Woody's Cassavetes movie, just as the previous Shadows and Fog was his Fellini (the title sounds like a sequel to Cassavetes's Husbands)–although Cassavetes wouldn't have couched the film's scenario in a faux-documentary framework, as Allen has. That's closer to Bob Fosse's turf; one imagines that Woody sees more of himself in Fosse, the entertainer, than he does Cassavetes, the brute poet. Shot in vérité handheld with an urgency that perhaps feels contrived, the film begins with the break-up of long-time marrieds Jack (a brilliant Sydney Pollack) and Sally (Oscar-nominated Judy Davis) and goes on to measure the shockwaves this sends through the lives of their friends, Gabe Roth (Allen) and his wife Judy (Mia Farrow). Sexually frustrated Jack falls into a relationship with a woman many years his junior (the lissome Sam (Lysette Anthony)), planting the seed for Gabe to act on his attraction to one of his writing students (Juliette Lewis). Judy, meanwhile, hooks Sally up with a co-worker, Michael (Liam Neeson). It's Judy's way of dealing with her own feelings for the guy, and needless to say, she didn't think it through.
Husbands and Wives marks the last time Allen and Farrow collaborated after a dozen pictures together. This was, of course, the project on which Farrow discovered that Allen was sleeping with her adopted daughter, Soon-Yi Previn. The chronology of those behind-the-scenes events is sketchy: one wonders how much Farrow knew during what would become her final scene with Allen the actor, a circular, increasingly resigned conversation between two people who put their resentments on ice a long time ago hoping to cheat their relationship's expiration date, though it's provocative all the same. Indeed, the subtext of Allen's affair–and his predilection for inappropriately young women–has given the film a timeless fascination, however ghoulish, that eludes most of his Eighties work. Watching it is akin to rubbernecking an accident scene, especially the aforementioned onscreen decoupling of Allen and Farrow, or the harrowing moment in which Jack's scary temper reduces Sam to a toddler–the rare, maybe only, instance of Allen depicting a downside to dating someone younger in such caustic terms, although he's careful not to make himself or one of his surrogates the bad guy with buyer's remorse. This is to say nothing of Gabe's parting shot, which I won't ruin here but which sort of plays like the antithesis of Annie Hall's "we need the eggs" speech. Husbands and Wives was the end of an era for Woody, a movie wherein he more or less bid adieu to New Yorkers with high bookshelves and commitment issues. For better (Bullets Over Broadway) or worse (Deconstructing Harry), he's ceased to be the man Quentin Crisp described as a "chain filmmaker," lighting the tip of the next film with the end of the last. But the ash of this one really lingers.
THE DVD
Columbia TriStar's DVD release of Husbands and Wives presents a remarkably fresh transfer of the film in both 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen and unmatted options on the same side of a dual-layer platter. Colours are slightly oversaturated and whites tend to bloom (possible compression artifacts, both), but the image–"remastered in Hi Definition," sayeth the disc's cover art–is crisp and warm, besting anything MGM managed in their three box sets of Allen's UA- and Orion-era output. One misses, however, MGM's semi-comprehensive liner notes. The DD 2.0 mono sound is a separate issue: I had to boost the volume six decibels above my normal listening level to achieve comfortable results. Trailers for Husbands and Wives and Allen's subsequent Manhattan Murder Mystery (Woody's Hitchcock movie) round out the bare-bones package.
108 minutes; R; 1.85:1 (16×9-enhanced), 1.33:1; English DD 2.0 (Mono), French DD 2.0 (Mono); CC; English, Spanish, Portuguese subtitles; DVD-9; Region One; Columbia TriStar
