I’ve always thought of Woody Allen as an ironist. In film after film he will have characters voicing opinions that pretty much reflect his own. But then he will have other characters effectively criticizing them with counter arguments that can be said to be equally reasonable.
But in this film, above all others, ironism seems to reign supreme. He often has characters here deconstructing [even lampooning] the character that everyone seems to associate with him.
And irony of ironies is that this film came out at the same time the Soon-yi Previn/child molestation scandal exploded. A pummeling [from both sides] that continues to this day. Irony in “real life” as it were.
Sex, love and the upper middle class. There really does not seem to be any way in which to get them right. And particular not in the world we live in today. There are just too many different combinations [sets] of circumstances that can throw any particular frame of mind for a loop. Mostly we see that perennial tug of war in which ambivalence prevails. They want something new but they don’t really want to completely give up what is old. Obviously, some couples fare better here than others. Or else it’s A loves B and B loves C. And D. And then E comes along and everything gets all the more convoluted still. Some of them are married, some of them are not.
The bottom line seems to be that in love and marriage…whatever works. And, regarding this, one size does not even come remotely close to fitting all.
This film garnered a 100% fresh rating at RT on 36 reviews. Not many film with over 30 reviews get that: rottentomatoes.com/m/1040798 … and_wives/
IMDb
[b]Contrary to general perception, Mia Farrow’s role is not autobiographical. Indeed, Woody Allen originally wrote the Judy Davis part with the idea of Farrow playing it. Farrow chose to take on the role of the cuckolded wife instead as it meant less shooting time for her.
Hoping to piggyback on the scandal surrounding Woody Allen’s break-up with Mia Farrow, TriStar opened the film on 865 screens, the largest amount ever given over to a Woody Allen picture. They were rewarded with an opening weekend of $3.52 million, the biggest ever for an Allen film.[/b]
at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Husbands_and_Wives
trailer: youtu.be/EyXde67_JaM
HUSBANDS AND WIVES [1992]
Written and directed by Woody Allen
[b]TV Scientist: Einstein was then celebrating, uh, the seventieth birthday anniversary and there was a colloquium given for him. And he said, “God doesn’t play dice with the universe”.
Gabe: No. He just plays hide-and-seek.
…
Judy: You lose patience if the student isn’t Dostoyevsky.
Gabe: No, that isn’t true. That’s crazy. It’s worth it when you get a gifted pupil. A young girl in my class just wrote a great story: “Oral Sex in the Age of Deconstruction.”
…
Judy: Do you ever hide things from me?
Gabe: Me? What kind of things?
Judy: I don’t know. Feelings, you know. Longings. Complaints.
Gabe: No. Do you?
Judy: No. [/b]
Again, remember when this film came out.
[b]Gabe: It’s cruel to bring life into this terrible world.
Judy: Oh, please. Don’t glorify your refusal on philosophical grounds.
…
Gabe: Okay, but put your diaphragm on.
[she leaves the room to get it]
Gabe [thinking about it]: You’d never say you were putting your diaphragm on and then not do it, right?
Judy: What? What a thing to say! That’s a terrible thing to say. You really trust no one. No wonder people accuse you of cynicism.
…
Sally: What are we seeing?
Paul: Don Giovanni.
Sally: A Don Juan story.
Paul: I can only think of it as Mozart.
Sally: Fucking Don Juans. They should have cut his fucking dick off.
…
Sally [to Paul]: What are you upset about? Fucking men! A woman gets to this age, it’s a different ball game. It’s great till you start to show your age, then they want a newer model.
…
Sally: Gail came to his office the year before. I’d met her several times. Look, what can I say? She’s cultivated, intelligent. It’s what he likes. She’s me, but she’s younger.
…
Gabe [to interviewer]: One time, many years ago I was living with this fabulous, interesting woman named Harriet Harmon. I’m ashamed to say this, but Harriet Harmon was the great love of my life. It was a very passionate relationship. I loved her very intensely. And, you know, we just made love everywhere. She was sexually carnivorous. We did it in stalled elevators…and in bushes and people’s houses, at parties in the bathroom…She got into dope for a while. She’d break that thing that you sniff when she’d have her orgasm. I was getting a real education. I was fascinated. I was absolutely nuts about her. And ultimately she wound up in an institution. I mean, it’s not funny, it was a very sad thing. She was great, but nuts. See, I’ve always had this penchant for what I call “kamikaze women.” I call them kamikazes because they crash their plane. They’re self-destructive. But they crash it into you, and you die with them.
…
Jack: I love Sally. But what’s wrong with aerobics? What am l? A snob?
Gabe: What’s it got to do with aerobics?
Jack: Big deal. So she’s not Simone de Beauvoir. I want somebody who screams when I fuck her.
Gabe: She’s a fucking cocktail waitress.
…
Sally [to Michael]: I did my college thesis on Bauhaus architecture. It was called “Function and Fascism.”
…
Gabe [to Rain]: I thought your line was great. “Life doesn’t imitate art, it imitates bad telvision.”
…
Rain: I spent five days searching for the perfect word to describe the husband and that’s when I came up with “apucious”.
Gabe: Apucious. I looked it up in the dictionary but I couldn’t find it.
Rain: Yeah, I know. I made it up.
Gabe: Oh, really.
Rain: Yeah. I thought it described him perfectly.
…
Interviewer: How are things going with Sam?
Jack: Great. Absolutely great. Saturday, we got up. We had a run down by the river. It was a beautiful day. It was terrific. I’m down to a good weight. I’m exercising. It feels incredible to get in shape. I eat great. Salads, no meat. Never touch meat. Later in the day, we rented some kind of a video. Some sort of dopey, funny, stupid little thing. Something Sally wouldn’t have allowed. I laughed like hell. I had a terrific time and I didn’t have to feel guilty about it. Like I said, she’s not Simone de Beauvoir. We argue sometimes.
[cut to Jack and Sam walking down the street]
Jack: Trust me. It’s King Lear. Shakespeare never wrote about a King Leo.
Sam: Well, Mr. Intellectual. Shakespeare wrote in English, not Japanese.
…
Sally [to Michael]: My marriage, I told you, was dead. For years. It’s the Second Law of Thermodynamics: sooner or later everything turns to shit. That’s my phrasing, not the Encyclopedia Britannica.
…
Rain: So I cleaned up my act and I’ve been dating Carl. As you can see, Richard is so unstable. He really took it badly.
Gabe: God! You’ve got material for your first novel and the sequel…and an opera by Puccini here! This is incredible.
Rain: Yes, but don’t you think I’m right? I mean, Carl, he’s fun. What the hell am I doing with the midlife crisis set? They’re all wonderful, rather accomplished men. In the end, I felt like I was a symbol of lost youth…or unfulfilled dreams.
…
Man at party: If astrology were true, twins would have the same fate.
Sam: It is true! It is totally, totally, totally provable, you know?
Female Party Guest: Provable how? From gypsies?
Sam: Well, it’s totally logical, right? You know, why wouldn’t the position of the planets have an influence on our personalities?
Female Party Guest: You know who believes this stuff? My babysitter.
Sam: They know. They know there is more crime during the full moon. It’s like the universe knows this stuff. You guys are all so smart but you just don’t get the fundamental basics of…
Female Party Guest: You should meet my babysitter. She doesn’t know anyone in New York…
Sam: Because the position of the planets is crucial to your life. I can’t stress this enough. And your body…
Female Party Guest: Be logical.
Sam: But I’m totally logical. I would not put a Sagittarius…
Jack: Sam, we gotta go. Come on.
…
Jack: This bullshit astrology. It’s stupid.
Sam: It’s not stupid.
Jack: I’m sick of listening to your crap about soybeans and Zen foods. They’re having an intellectual conversation in there, and you’re jerking off about tofu.
…
Sally [to interviewer]: I thought that I liked what Michael was doing to me, and it felt different from Jack; more gentle. And more exciting. And I thought how different Michael was from Jack. How much deeper his vision of life was. And I thought Michael was a hedgehog and Jack was a fox. And then I thought Judy was a fox and Gabe was a hedgehog. And I thought about all the people I knew, and which were hedgehogs and which were foxes. Al Simon, a friend, was a hedgehog, and his wife Jenny was a hedgehog. And Cindy Salkind was a fox. And Lou Patrino was a hedgehog.[/b]
Don’t ask.
[b]Rain reads from Gabe’s new book: “The heart raged, grew melancholy and confused…and toward what end? To articulate what nitwit strategy? Procreation? It told him something. How millions of sperm competed for a single egg, not the other way around. Men would make love with any number of women…even total strangers, while females were more selective. They were catering to the demands of one small egg. While males had millions of frantic sperms screaming wildly: ‘Let us out, let us out now!’…Feldman longed to meet an attractive woman with this personality: A sense of humour equal to his…a love of music equal to his with a particular love of Bach and balmy climates. In short, himself as a pretty woman.”
…
Rain reads from Gabe’s new book: “What happened after the honeymoon? Did desire grow or did familiarity make partners long for other lovers? Was the notion of ever-deepening romance a myth along with simultaneous orgasm? The only time Rifkin and his wife experienced a simultaneous orgasm was when the judge granted their divorce. Maybe in the end, the idea was not to expect too much out of life.”
…
Rain: I just think that maybe I…I could’ve been threatened by certain things in the book.
Gabe: Like what…?
Rain: Um, some of the attitudes towards women and your ideas on life.
Gabe: You told me you love the book.
Rain: I do. I do love it, yeah.
Gabe: What were your criticisms?
Rain: Um, nothing.
Gabe: No, tell me. Tell me what your criticisms were.
Rain: I was a little disappointed, I guess, with, ah, with some of your attitudes.
Gabe: Like what? What attitudes?
[Rain sighs]
Gabe: With what?
Rain: The way your people just casually have affairs like that, that’s…
Gabe: Well, the book doesn’t condone affairs. You know, I’m exaggerating for comic purposes.
Rain: Yeah, I mean but are our choices really between chronic dissatisfaction and suburban drudgery?
Gabe: No, but, you know, that’s how I…I’m deliberately distorting it, you know, 'cause I’m trying to show how hard it is to be married and…
Rain: Well, you have to be careful not to trivialize with things like that.
Gabe: Well, Jesus, I…I hope I haven’t.
Rain: Well, the way your… your lead character views women, it’s so retrograde. It’s so shallow, you know?
Gabe: What are you talking…You told me you…you know, that… you told me it was a great book.
Rain: Yeah, it’s wonderful. And I never said great. I said it’s brilliant, and it’s alive, and… You know, that’s not what I’m…We’re not arguing about whether it’s brilliant or not. I’m, you know… Triumph of the Will was a great movie, but you despise the ideas behind it.
Gabe: What…what are you saying, now? You despise my ideas?
Rain: No, I don’t despise them. All right, that… that example was wrong.
[pause]
Rain: OK, isn’t it beneath you as a mature thinker, I mean, to allow your lead character to waste so much of this emotional energy obsessing over this psychotic relationship with a woman that you fantasize as powerfully sexual and inspired when, in fact, she was pitifully sick?
Gabe: Look, let’s stop this right now because I don’t need a lecture on maturity or writing from a 20-year-old twit.
…
Gabe: Boy, I’d hate to be your boyfriend! He must go through hell.
Rain: Well, I’m worth it.
…
Jack [now back together with sally having dinner with Gabe and Judy]: You can’t just wipe out years of closeness. You think you can. But the roots are there.
Sally: I think some people are just not meant to be single.
Jack: Everybody screws up. The question is…do you learn from it?
Sally: I think the true test is how you weather a crisis.
Jack: Everyone looks great when everything’s going smoothly. It’s great. If you can be that mature, it’s great. You just start thinking about priorities.
Sally: How long can you discuss physical fitness and the zodiac?
…
Judy: That’s the way I felt then. People change. I’m not the same person I was.
Gabe: That’s why relationships go sour.
Judy: Yeah, you hate change.
Gabe: Change equals death!
Judy: What kind of bullshit? That’s just a bullshit line! Maybe you fool your twenty-year-old students into thinking that’s some kind of a, an insight or something, but it means nothing! Change is what life is made of! Change…if you don’t change, you don’t grow, you just shrivel up!
…
Judy [to Gabe]: You use sex to express every emotion except love.
…
Gabe: I saw myself sleepwalking into a mess.
Interviewer: Then why didn’t you stop yourself?
Gabe: There was something in my marriage that I was not getting. Rain. There was excitement there.
Interviewer: Rain had a boyfriend.
Gabe: I know. Everything about it was wrong. That did not deter me. If anything, as usual, there was something interesting.
Interviewer: So, what is it? You have a self-destructive streak?
Gabe: I don’t know. My heart…does not know from logic.
…
Sally: [to interviewer]: I’ve learned, anyway, that love is…not about passion and romance necessarily. It’s also about companionship and…it’s like a buffer against loneliness, I think.
Jack: That stuff is really important. Somebody to grow old with. What kills most people is unreal expectations.
Interviewer: What about things that can’t be talked about? Like sexual problems, for instance.
Sally: Unresolved.
Interviewer: Unresolved?
Sally: Well, there’s some things you can’t solve and then…you have to live with it. You construct some kind of patchwork thing. But sometimes they flare up.
Jack: They do, and when it happens…it gets tough when that happens.
Sally: You learn to deal with it and then push it back down.
Jack: And it works. That’s the weird thing. It’s not bad.
Sally: You can’t force yourself to conform to some abstract vision of love, or, you know, marriage. Every situation’s different.
Jack: Whatever works is the deal. Ours is just one way.[/b]