Husbands and Wives wastes no time in establishing the mood. The film opens with a couple, Gabe (Allen) and Judy Roth (Farrow), having the kind of hurried, light conversation people have while they wait to go out. Gabe hovers over their respectfully small television and makes a quip about God; Judy is tidying. Their apartment is book-lined and cosy. The doorbell rings and our second couple, Sally and Jack, enter. They have news: ‘we’re splitting up,’ Sally announces matter-of-factly. The newly separated couple are fine with it and insist on going ahead with the group’s plans for the evening. Judy takes the news badly and appears to begin moving through The Five Stages of Grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, but not acceptance. The death of their close friends’ relationship has rattled her. Freud would find it all very interesting. It’s a familiar theme, but Allen and his characters are aging; decrepitude and lonely obsolescence threatens. The message is landed like a punch to the gut within two minutes: love fades!
Shot in the style of a documentary, the film’s formal aspects are similarly visceral. Allen employs shaky handheld cameras, jump cuts, unrehearsed zooms and interviews with the characters about their thoughts on life and love. Producing something halfway between cinéma vérité and low-budget independent cinema, the result mugs the characters of their egos and their self-narratives. Apparently truthful and sure interview answers are spliced together with grubby truths caught on street corners and overheard in the bustle of bars and house parties. Allen’s visions of Upper East Side living has never looked more mundane, New York never grubbier.
What follows is a square dance of couplings as everyone tries to best please themselves. Jack revisits his youth with a lithe-limbed but dopey aerobics instructor, Sally gets together with an earnest co-worker of Judy’s who recites Keats when drunk, Judy falls in love with that earnest co-worker, Gabe entertains the advances of a precocious student, and so on. The inspiration is Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage, but unlike Allen’s previous acts of hero-worship such as the overly-mannered Interiors, here he actually feels like he has something to say – or, rather, doesn’t. Husbands and Wives is consciously messy and thrashed out; imbued with the directors own feeling and workings out – not just following steps like a protégé. Decay and compromise is the overriding theme; individuals fight, have physical scrabbles, and swear at each other like snotty adolescents. The humour for the most part is rueful and there’s little in the way of a redemptive note or genuine fulfilment by the end. In a closing set of interviews, the answers tell all: ‘love…is a buffer against loneliness’, ‘we learn to tolerate one another’, ’whatever works’.
The usual Art-Life link is there. ‘Are our choices really between chronic dissatisfaction and suburban drudgery?’ Raine, the precocious student (Juliette Lewis), asks Gabe. He’s a novelist and writing teacher, but he doesn’t whisk her off to the cinema or foist Tolstoy or Dostoevsky on her – she already knows about that, anyway. Earlier he jokes ‘life doesn’t imitate art, it imitates bad television.’ An Allen line so Allen that you’re certain he’s used it before, used it funnier. But it’s here in this movie as a plaintive sigh as much as a funny quip. With his very un-perfect break-up with Mia Farrow in the tabloids at the time of the movie’s release, Allen could’ve made his most romantic, redemptive film. Instead we have a frank, angry and resigned look into how people are. ‘Can I go? Is this over?’ Gabe asks in the film’s closing interview; he’s working on a new novel, – ‘it’s less confessional, more political’ – the screen cuts to black.
