Husbands and Wives, Woody’s
fabulous take on his idol Bergman’s Scenes from A Marriage, might well be the last masterpiece in his prolific
filmography thus far. Mordantly funny, incredibly penetrating, wryly ironic, deeply
perceptive, and filled with elements of docu-drama, the film provided a darkly
fascinating examination on marriage, fidelity and neurosis amongst Woody’s pet
demography of intellectual, urban, upper middle-class. When their best friends
Jack (Sydney Pollack) and his striking wife Sally (Judy Davis) casually
announce during a dinner invitation that they have decided to split, the news
do not just infuriate Gabe Roth (Woody) and his wife Judy (Mia Farrow), it
literally rips apart the veneer of their seemingly happy married life by
bringing to the surface rarely spoken discontents and dissatisfaction in their
relationship. While Jack starts dating a pretty, dim-witted aerobics instructor
(Lysette Anthony) and Sally plunges into a tentative affair with the dandy and
younger Michael (Liam Neeson), it’s clear that neither relationships would last
long. On the other hand, Gabe, a novelist who borrows freely from his own life,
starts getting deeply besotted with his precocious student (Juliette Lewis) who
hero-worships him, while Judy finds her infatuation towards Michael, who’s her
colleague, turning into love, and one realizes that their lives have started
taking divergent paths. Faux-interviews of the characters were slyly juxtaposed
with the narrative, which added to the film’s brittle, pungent, self-deprecatory,
bare-knuckled and at times disconcerting humour (given Woody and Mia’s scandalous
break-up during the time of the film’s release) and underlying melancholia,
aided in no small parts by the savage, witty and perceptive script, terrific
character arcs, and fabulous performances by the ensemble cast.
Note: My earlier review of the film can be found here.
Director: Woody Allen
Genre: Comedy Drama/Urban Comedy/Marriage Drama
Language: English
Country: US
The beautifully titled A Pigeon Sat on the Branch Reflecting on Existence brought to close
Roy Andersson’s droll, poignant, episodic and highly ambitious ‘Grandeur of Existence Trilogy’, which comprised of Songs from the Second Floor and You, the Living, and made 7 years apart
from each other. Mordant humour, deadpan observations on the perils of modern
existence, melancholic undertones, stylized production designs, static
camerawork, multiple tableaus stringed around a central narrative, and
meditations on such themes as mortality, unemployment, loneliness,
socio-economic oppression, and so forth, imbued the trilogy with the feel of
one continuous show shot as three different films. The central tale dealt with
the woes, frustrations and existential crises of Sam (Nils Westblom) and
Jonathan (Holger Andersson), two travelling salesmen striving in futility to
sell novelty items intended to make people laugh – ironically, sight of the two
glum, ageing and down-on-luck men, with no companions but each other, and
living in claustrophobic apartments, was anything but smile-inducing. Various
vignettes were woven around this – the bitingly funny sequence where the sons
of a dying lady try to get hold of valuables clutched by her as she’s convinced
she can carry them to afterlife; an enthralling and deeply tragic musical interlude
where a partially crippled waitress at a bar rouses emotions among a group of
young, sad-faced war drafts many years back; Charles XII, the glibly callous
Swedish king, making a stop at a diner in order to make a trip to the loo; et
al. Despite the been-there-seen-that feel that is bound to emanate having
watched the earlier two films, on its own this once again managed in being a
simultaneously playful and bleak work filled with striking visual signatures
and a running sense of pathos.
Director: Roy Andersson
Genre: Black Comedy/Social Satire/Ensemble Film
Language: Swedish
Country: Sweden
