September (1987)

Written and directed like a stage play, September is Allen’s studied portrait of the asymmetry of love. Set over a weekend stay at a Vermont country house where depressive Lane (Mia Farrow) plays host to her actress mother (Elaine Stritch) and husband, Lloyd (Jack Warden) along with her best friend, Stephanie (Dianne Wiest) and neighbours, Peter (Sam Waterston) and Howard (Denholm Elliott). Howard loves Lane who loves Peter who loves Stephanie while Mum and step-Dad knock back the booze.

As if he had completely forgotten the misfire that was his 1978 foray into the Bergmanesque, Interiors, September is lugubrious in tone with the entire cast garbed in the most god-awfully drab wardrobe imaginable and Farrow looking like an inmate at a rest-home, the film is so pointedly contrived and burdened with explication that it sounds like especially bad Noël Coward.

The sterling cast can do nothing with the wooden dialogue (for example, when Peter asks Stephanie to come to Paris with him she responds “Paris, Oh you really are a writer…) as Allen shifts from one miserable configuration to the next and Art Tatum and Ben Webster blow cool in the background ("which one's Art Tatum?" trills Stephanie). Adding to the general lacklustre effect, there is a major but unnecessary reveal in the latter part of the play involving Lane’s relationship with her mother, an apparent turnaround that simply gets brushed aside as everyone seems to decide they couldn't really care less about something that happened thirty years previously (and nor could we).

His best work behind him, Allen was by this time moving to a journeyman approach to film-making, crafting neat little stories of human foibles and follies. Despite the lack of jokes, this is a characteristic example of the style although one of his least engaging, and with Interiors one of his worst, efforts.

 

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