Austere but Never Dull

Interiors Written and directed by Woody Allen.

After running concurrently with the Film Festival, Interiors finished last week at the St. James (or at least was scheduled to do so at the time of going to print). Well, I guess that's the way the cookie crumbles — quite a lot of people will have missed a really fine film simply because of overly aggressive distribution competition.

But never mind, it will return. And when it does, everyone who missed it should make a point of seeing it. It's excellent in every respect, and instantly one of my favourite films. Partly because of the acting.

The entire cast is very good, but Geraldine Page and Maureen Stapleton stand out in their large-as-life roles as neurotic mother and brash, extroverted divorcee respectively. Equally impressive are the detailed and disturbingly subtle performances of Diane Keaton and Marybeth Hurt, who both show capable of evoking strong audience sympathy while maintaining an uncomfortable ambiguity.

Also, Interiors is visually, very very beautiful. Designer Mel Bourne has realised Eve's 'ice palaces' as confining and claustrophobic museum/prisons, which are in turn beautifully rendered by Gordon Willis's superb cinematography. His compositions are clear, simple, and precise.

The film's motifs of colour, lighting, ornaments, flowers and windows are able to be powerfully developed by their presence or absence as details m Willis's otherwise almost blank frames. It's a device which works very well. As the film progresses, an expressive shorthand is created which is then used of communicate or reinforce many relationships and ideas in the script. Sound heavy and pedantic? It isn't. But it is a very common idea in 'psychological' movies, though I don't think I've ever seen it as capably or tellingly handled as it is here.

Which leads right into the script and direction, and Woody Allen. Up until now, Woody Allen's films have all been comedies. I'd better say here and now that I've only seen Take The Money And Run and Annie Hall, but it seems a general rule that though these previous films have been built around laughs, ther's always been at least a partly serious note in the laughter. A concern with man' condition, his predicament, human relationships, call it what you like. Interiors is very much another manifestation of the same sort of concerns as we find in, say, Annie Hall. However, though it does contain some humour, it's no comedy. Fair enough, because it's essentially about people who cannot laugh. But where Interiors does surprise is in it's surefootedness, its control.

It is part of the episodic and improvisational nature of Annie Hall that gives it a feeling of comic spontaneity, almost haphazardness. The feeling comes through in other Allen films — as if there are things he wants to say, and he's intuitively feeling his way towards an expression of them. In Annie Hall, this 'intuitive' approach was brilliantly successful. In Interiors, its nowhere in evidence. The script and direction are both, like the film's photographic style, clear-cut, economical, and accurate. Both are finely controlled and intelligently structured — in a word, superb. It's as if suddenly. Woody Allen has known exactly what he wanted to say and exactly the way he wanted to say it.

Paul Hagan.