Interiors (1978)
Directed by Woody Allen

Film Review

Interiors may be Woody Allen's first foray into straight drama but it is by no means his first attempt to tackle the deeply serious themes that underpin his art, both as a comedian and writer-director.  Tonally, Interiors, the seventh film that Allen wrote and directed and the first he did not himself appear in, is a massive departure from its author's previous screen offerings, and Allen was himself convinced that the film would flop.  As it turned out, the critics were (mostly) fulsome in their praise for what many considered to be Allen's most explicit attempt to imitate his personal hero, the Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman, and it was even a moderate success at the box office.  Woody Allen had made his name as a comic performer and director of film comedies.  With Interiors, he proved that he could also succeed without having to make his audience laugh - it was a pivotal film that would be the precursor to some of his best (and worst) work.

Right from the off, Interiors impresses as an altogether more sombre and introspective piece than Allen was known for at the time.  The opening montage of mournfully lit shots in the rooms of an abandoned beach house, with no sound to accompany them, are felt as a crushing lament - what we feel immediately is a pain that cannot be expressed for a loss that cannot be endured. It is the aching interior void we all feel when someone close to us has departed this world.  As we soon see, this solemn opening provides a fitting visual metaphor for the lives of the protagonists, an estranged middleclass couple and their three wildly different daughters.  They form a quintet of troubled souls who, throughout the film, appear wilfully immured in an anaemic phantom existence, drifting through life more like faint shadows on a wall than real people.  The emptiness of their lives is made evident through Gordon Willis's sober cinematography and the strikingly glacial set design (the work of Mel Bourne and Daniel Robert) and we soon realise that what the matriarch Eve has been doing with her life is not to raise a family, but rather to construct a perfect still life - what the French call a nature morte.

It is because of their mother's controlling influence (she will never allow so much as a table lamp to be put out of place) that the three sisters fail to develop and live full and satisfied lives.  On the threshold of middle-age, their illusions rapidly fading, they come to see not only the futility of their lives but also the cause of their failure.  The mother they are obliged to love and who, as depression and a degenerative brain disorder do their worst, needs their support more than ever, has become unbearable to them all.  Paralysed by indecision, fear of failure and an awareness of the nearness of death, the three daughters each lives a separate existence in a melancholy of quiet despair, each trapped in her own little room.

The critics were quick to connect Interiors with some of Ingmar Bergman's films, most notably his masterpiece Cries and Whispers (1972), which stylistically it does at times resemble.  However, the strongest influence is almost certainly Eugene O'Neill's 1941 play Long Day's Journey into Night, which offers a similarly intense portrait of a dysfunctional American family falling apart before our eyes.  Allen's script may lack the depth and subtlety of O'Neill's landmark play, but the characters are just as real, thanks in no small measure to the exquisite performances from the four female leads, who include Allen's muse and frequent co-star Diane Keaton. Geraldine Page leaves the strongest impression as the dominating mother Eve - she received a Best Supporting Actress BAFTA for her performance and was also nominated for an Oscar.  The film received further Oscar nominations for its direction, screenplay and art design, and Maureen Stapleton was also nominated for her supporting role.

On the face of it, Interiors may seem like a seismic shift from Allen's previous work but it is merely approaching from a graver angle those themes that had already featured in his earlier comedies - a neurotic obsession with death and failure, the fragility of human relationships and the seeming pointlessness of existence.  It is a haunting work, bleakly Chekhovian in its composition, darkly scathing in its assessment of the hollowness of the American dream, which places material success over family responsibility and true inner fulfilment.  Interiors is perhaps the most beguiling and impactful of Allen's 'serious' films.  It avoids the heavy-handedness and wearying self-consciousness of his later films, which struggle to make a coherent statement and tend to get tangled up in their artistic pretensions.  A perfectly constructed chamberpiece, Interiors alternately enchants and lacerates with its quiet contemplation on the human condition - and this is what makes it one of the most rewarding of Woody Allen's dramatic films.

Film Synopsis

Arthur, a wealthy corporate lawyer, and Eve, an interior designer, have three grown-up daughters who are all obsessed with making a success of their lives.  The eldest is Renata, a published poet who fears her creative powers may be deserting her.  She gets little support from her husband Frederick, a writer who is still struggling to make a name for himself.  The youngest daughter Flyn seldom sees her parents, so busy is she with her career as a movie actress.  She is the most contented of the three sisters, but even she has started to question the value of her work.  The middle sister Joey is at an impasse.  She is the daughter who is most preoccupied with her mother's declining mental health and uses this as an excuse for her inability to settle on a career.  One day, Arthur announces to his family that he wants a trial separation.  This news pushes Eve over the edge and she attempts suicide.  When Arthur next visits his daughters, it is in the company of the person he intends to marry, a down-to-earth woman named Pearl.  The already brittle relationship between the three sisters further deteriorates as family unity is torn apart by guilt and recrimination.