Husbands and Wives (1992)

Director: Woody Allen

Cast: Woody Allen, Mia Farrow, Sydney Pollack

Synopsis: When their best friends announce that they’re separating, a professor and his wife discover the faults in their own marriage.

Woody Allen’s Husbands and Wives is a compelling, totally absorbing dissection of marriage and commitment, of the unexpected fragility of both, and the subsequent tendency for life-decisions based on experience to be little more than compromise: a strategy to evade loneliness, a settling for what one can get rather than what one wants, or simply a fear of life outside of an unsatisfactory relationship.

The acting is uniformly excellent throughout, and for every jarring, shaky hand-held shot – a technique which, rather than conveying a sense of actually being there, merely serves to remind the viewer s/he is watching a movie – there is a beautifully executed sequence of shots to savour (for example, the lingering way the camera studies Juliette Lewis during her and Woody’s argument about his novel).

(Reviewed 4th February 2002)