Another Woman is the first Woody Allen film to begin with a prologue prior to the credits, and only the second to begin with a voice-over narration (Manhattan began with a prologue but had no traditional credits). Using what has now become a familiar Allen technique, we see an empty space—this time a hallway with a door at its end—into which a character moves; in this case it is the film’s protagonist, Marion Post (Gena Rowlands).
Over the sound of a clock ticking, we hear Marion describing herself as the director of undergraduate studies in philosophy at a very fine women’s college. She is married to a cardiologist who, she jokingly tells us, once “examined her heart, liked what he saw, and proposed.” The marriage is a second one for both of them, and her husband has a teenaged daughter to whom she has tried to be a good stepmother. She quickly mentions that she has a married brother (she tells us nothing about him), goes on to mention that her mother recently passed away, and proudly says that her father is still alive and in good health. While she is telling us all this, we see pictures of each of the characters she is describing, including a picture of herself, alone, looking into the camera with a very self-satisfied expression.
She goes on to tell us that she is in the process of starting a new book, always a difficult thing to do; and so, having taken a leave of absence from her work, she has rented a small apartment away from her home (where, she claims, nearby construction noise distracts her), so that she can shut herself off and concentrate on her writing. It is only at this point that Allen’s black-and-white credits roll to the soothing music of Eric Satie’s Symphony Number 3.
Separated from the rest of the film as it is, this prologue tells us a great deal about Marion. Like the prologue, Marion has set herself off from everything—both literally, by getting a solitary apartment in which she can be alone with her work, and metaphorically, by choosing to isolate herself from those around her. She shows us the important people in her life through static photographs that allow her to categorize them solely in terms of the neat little labels she has attached to each of them (husband, undisciplined stepdaughter, married brother, dead mother, alive and healthy dad).
She tells us there is “not much else to say,” as though her life were so well-structured and complete that actually going about the task of living it is almost an unnecessary formality. Her life stands fulfilled ontically as one of achievement. Yet, of course, we know that if this were really the case, there would be no reason for her to be telling us about herself, and no reason to make a film about her.
Her voice-over narrative, which continues throughout the film, uses an interesting selection of tenses. Let us examine the first sentence we hear her say: “If someone had asked me when I reached my fifties to assess my life, I would have said I had achieved a decent measure of fulfillment, both personally and professionally; beyond that, I would say, I don’t choose to delve.” This sentence begins by referring to the past in a subjective manner (“If someone had asked me … I would have said”) implying that she is now speaking from some later point. Yet the sentence ends in the present (“beyond that, I would say, I don’t choose to delve”). The second sentence reveals the same unusual structure. It begins in the past (“Not that I was afraid of uncovering some dark side of my character”) and ends in the present (“but I always feel that if something seems to be working, leave it alone!”).
This grammatical structure is sufficiently ambiguous to confuse us about the timing of the narrative we are hearing. Is Marion telling us about her current life, or is she recalling a stage in her life beyond which she has now progressed? The answer to this puzzle is not given to us until the film’s ending, when we are able to conclude with some confidence that in fact the film we are watching is a visual presentation of the book Marion finally chooses to write. This interesting film structure somewhat parallels that of Manhattan, in which it eventually becomes clear that the film is the novel that Isaac is starting to write during the voice-over prologue.
With this revelation, it is possible to analyze this film hermeneutically, that is, using a technique of reinterpretation based on all that we know by the time we have watched the film in its entirety. On the surface, the film shows us a woman who slowly and painfully comes to realize that her life is not as perfect as she initially believed. This process of introspection is initiated by Marion’s accidental discovery that, through a heating vent, she can clearly overhear the sessions of a psychiatrist who has an office in the apartment next to hers.
At first, when she overhears the traumas of a man struggling with his bisexuality (a problem completely foreign to Marion), this discovery seems to be merely a momentary irritation, easily resolved by placing two sofa cushions against the vent. Later, when Marion is roused from a drowsy state by the tortured musings of a woman patient (one of the cushions having slipped from its place), this aural accident becomes the catalyst that precipitates Marion’s reevaluation of her life.
Returning to the prologue, we can now interpret the meaning of the strange tense structure. Knowing that the narration is Marion’s voice from the end of the film examining herself as she was at the beginning of the film, it is understandable that she starts her sentences recalling how she was; and because she has only recently begun to change, by the end of those sentences she has reentered the way of thinking she was in at the film’s beginning. In other words, this film should be viewed as Marion’s therapeutic autobiography, her attempt to recapture her own ways of being in order to transform them from the perspective of an increasingly greater self-understanding.
While such a technique is basic to many different forms of therapy, it is most closely associated with the approaches used in phenomenological schools of psychology, those most influenced by the work of such philosophers as Martin Heidegger. This makes sense because, early in the film, we learn that Marion’s field of study is in fact German philosophy and that she has written some important work on Heidegger. Indeed, Yacowar (1991, p. 265) describes Marion as a “Heideggerean philosopher” who “represents self-deluding rationalization.” In an end note, he remarks that “in ‘Remembering Needleman,’ Allen parodied Heidegger as a scandalously self-serving rationalizer” (p. 296).
Yet Yacowar is incorrect in claiming that Marion is presented as a Heideggerean from the film’s beginning. In fact, in the one scene in which Heidegger is mentioned, just the opposite is suggested. This scene, a painful memory of the engagement party for her and her current husband, Ken (Ian Holm), also shows Marion resisting the passionate advances of a novelist named Larry Lewis (Gene Hackman) and ends with the unpleasant appearance of Ken’s first wife, Kathy (Betty Buckley). During a series of toasts from their friends, one female partygoer says, “And to Marion’s new book! German philosophy will never be the same!” to which Marion answers, “Let’s hope not!” This is immediately followed by a large, bearded man’s declaration: “Marion, you’ll go on forever. Heidegger definitely got what he deserved!”
These toasts suggest that Marion’s work on German philosophy, and specifically on Heidegger, is extremely critical, not supportive as Yacowar suggests. Furthermore, as we interpret the film hermeneutically (again, understanding its earlier scenes from the perspective of its ending), it becomes increasingly clear that the “new Marion” (the one at the film’s end) is critical of the “old Marion” (the one at the film’s beginning) precisely because of her conversion to an acceptance of the most important claims made by Heidegger, claims about such issues as the ontic versus the ontological, the authentic versus the inauthentic, and the important role of dread and the “call.” In fact, the method of hermeneutics, which seems most appropriate for understanding the film’s structure, is one that was used by Heidegger and is closely associated with his work.
Heidegger claimed that too much emphasis is put on the ontic, present-at-hand approach to life and not enough on the ontological and ready-to-hand approach which is prior and more characteristic of one’s human condition as being-in-the-world. Heidegger urges us to view our lives as inseparable from all that is around us, and, through the experience of dread (a realization of one’s genuine mortality), he describes how one is faced with the choice of either becoming authentic or inauthentic. The authentic person chooses to fulfill her true caring nature, even though this means exposing the vulnerable parts of herself to a world of others who can sometimes treat her harshly. On the other hand, the inauthentic person chooses to fall into the Mitsein, in which one hides one’s real nature behind a mask designed to superficially satisfy the demands of others without exposing one’s true self to the inspection of the world.
Our first exposures to Marion reveal her to be just the sort of person whom Heidegger would describe as indifferent or inauthentic. She cuts herself off from the rest of the world and classifies everyone (including herself) in ontic terms which deny the genuine, ongoing connections between them. She hides her true feelings behind a mask of normalcy. Her jokey characterization of the origins of her relationship with Ken in the prologue typifies the old Marion’s concealment of her true feelings and the derivative nature of her smug descriptions of her life.
Once again (hermeneutics requires a perpetual process of reinterpretation), she tells us that Ken, in his role as a cardiologist, “examined her heart, liked what he saw, and proposed.” By reducing the emotional connotations of the word “heart” to their physical ones, Marion trivializes their relationship by suggesting that Ken chose her in the same way that one might choose a car, by inspecting the engine and kicking the tires.
As an expert on the present-to-hand forestructure of the heart, Ken has little interest in its more ontological activities. Marion initially hides this fact from us (and herself). Only later, in a crucial memory of the engagement party, do we discover that Ken was still married when he took Marion’s heart for a test drive, and that, unfeelingly, Ken chose to be with Marion at precisely the time that his wife was in the hospital having her ovaries removed. Continuing the car metaphor, Ken was unwilling to “own” a wife who had just lost her most characteristically female parts, so he lost no time in trading her in on a model that was in better condition.
Ken’s choice to live his life as an inauthentic, unfeeling person is epitomized by his reaction to Kathy’s “scene” at the engagement party when she appears unexpectedly to return some of his things. Rather than becoming emotional, he retains his composure, physically forcing her out the door as she accuses him of committing “adultery with a philosophy professor in a Holiday Inn while his wife is in the hospital having her ovaries removed!” His response (“I realize that you’ve been hurt, and if I’ve done anything wrong I am sorry. I accept your condemnation”) is wholly inadequate to deal with the horrendous charge she has made against him.
Later in the film, when Marion confronts Ken with her realization that he is having an affair with Lydia (Blythe Danner), one half of the married couple who are supposedly their best friends (Marion and Ken even spend their anniversary with them), Ken responds to her accusations in exactly the same polite, formal, unfeeling manner. Like Yale, Mary, and so many other inauthentic Allen characters, Ken is entirely self-involved and unwilling to concede that an apology is insufficient compensation for those whom one has thoroughly betrayed. Furthermore, like Lloyd in September (1987), Ken is a man of science who has accepted the claims of his intellect over those of his soul. He lives his life in a cocoon of empty formality coupled with a mechanical hedonism that drives him from one woman to another.
Marion has no excuse for ignoring Ken’s failings at the time of their marriage. At the engagement party, Larry, the novelist who loves her, tries desperately to persuade her to break off with Ken and live with him. When she upbraids him for being disloyal to his friend (she met him through Ken), we are struck by the irony of her remark, given the degree of loyalty Ken has shown to his own wife and will later show to Marion. The situation is reminiscent of Danny Rose’s attempt to defend Lou to Tina by suggesting that Lou would never cheat on more than one person at a time. Larry speaks with Allen’s voice when he challenges Marion’s complacency in the following exchange:
LARRY: What can I say to change your heart?
MARION: I’m really amazed at you! He’s your friend! He’s just had an embarrassing experience.
LARRY: Yes, he is my friend, and I love him, but he’s a prig, he’s cold and he’s stuffy. Can’t you see that? “I accept your condemnation,” Jesus!
MARION: He handled the very difficult moment quite well.
LARRY: Oh, too well! Do you like that?
MARION: He’s a wonderful man! He’s a terrific doctor! I love to be with him! I love reading books with him! Having …
LARRY: [pointing to his head] It’s all up here! Up here!
MARION: And he’s sexy!
Larry ridicules Marion’s attempt to convince him, and herself, that Ken is worthy of the love she pretends to feel for him. Larry is right when he characterizes their relationship as being all intellect and no emotion. In fact, Marion’s memory of the scene follows her realization that she and Ken do not have the kind of passionate relationship that would allow for spontaneous acts of lovemaking like the one described by Lydia and Mark (Bruce Jay Friedman) at a party.
As the film progresses, she remembers that she and Larry did once feel such authentic passion for one another when they kissed in a tunnel in the park; however, at that time, Marion was too afraid of her genuine feelings, and too comfortable in her web of self-deception, to allow those feelings to fully emerge.
Heidegger claims that the “call” to authenticity is heard only by those who have come face-to-face with the reality of their own mortality. Initially, it is unclear that Marion’s dread has resulted from such an experience; but later, when she has lunch with Hope (Mia Farrow), the pregnant woman whose therapy sessions she’s overheard, Marion reveals that the experience of turning fifty was in fact just such an encounter with the awareness of her own death. She describes how she was never affected by the traumas which everyone predicted for her when she turned thirty and forty, but fifty hit her hard. While acknowledging that she wasn’t that old, she describes how she realized that she had determined much of her life by the choices she had made, some of which she admits to regretting today. The ticking of the clock heard in the film’s prologue and early scenes now makes sense: it reflects Marion’s realization that her time is running out, that she can no longer afford to hide her true feelings from herself.
Hope’s role in the film is ambiguous. At first, we only hear her words (we don’t see her), and those words seem to accurately describe Marion’s situation. Marion hears Hope only when she herself is in a disconnected mental state, most usually when she is drowsy or asleep. Marion’s introduction to Hope is an evocative description of her own inner voice. Resting her head on her desk in a state of exhaustion, Marion is brought back to awareness by the intrusion of Hope’s voice, a monologue that could well be the “call” of Marion’s authentic self precipitated by her trauma at turning fifty and facing her own mortality:
I just know that I woke up during the middle of the night and time passed and I began having troubling thoughts about my life, like there was something about it not real, full of deceptions, but these deceptions had become so many, and so much a part of me now, that I couldn’t even tell who I really was. So I began to perspire. I sat up in bed with my heart just pounding and I looked at my husband in bed next to me and it was as if he was a stranger. And I turned on the light and woke him up, and I asked him to hold me. And, only after a long time did I finally get my bearings.
In addition to being Marion’s double, her inner voice, Hope is also a flesh-and-blood person whom Marion can see and follow and, eventually, meet and talk with.
After Marion is transformed by her realizations about herself during her lunch with Hope, and by her simultaneous discovery of Ken’s infidelity, Marion encounters Hope one last time. Returning to her apartment, Marion overhears Hope describing her encounter with Marion and hears herself described as a very sad woman who, Hope fears, is exactly what she herself might become if she doesn’t change directions immediately. Later, when Marion approaches the psychiatrist (Michael Kirby) to reveal the problem of the vent, he tells her that Hope has left town and can no longer be reached.
An alternative interpretation of Hope’s presence in the film is suggested by Allen’s use of the poems of Rainer Maria Rilke. Marion’s mother, who died before the film began, is eventually revealed to have been a passionate, feeling woman who liked to walk in the woods and read the poems of Rilke, a habit Marion emulated as a young girl. Rilke (1875–1926) was a German poet who devoted himself to what he viewed as the primary task of his time, the reconciliation of our deepest inner feelings with the apparent lack of any foundation for a reasoned belief in a spiritual reality. Greatly influenced by existential precursors such as Nietzsche, Rilke was a Romantic poet in a period when Romanticism was desperately in need of a basis for belief.
In response to the fundamental alienation of the contemporary life, Rilke claimed that we must commit ourselves totally to our feelings even though we know we can never prove their validity. At one point, Marion rereads one of her mother’s favorite Rilke poems and discovers the stains of her mother’s tears on the page near these lines:
for there is no place therein
that does not see you.
You must change your life.
Through Rilke’s poetry, Marion’s mother’s voice calls to her, just as Hope’s voice did, urging her to transform herself while she still can.
Marion’s father (played by John Houseman as an old man and David Ogden Stiers as a young one) is an academic historian who resembles Ken in his empty formality, his disdain for feeling, and his failure to love the ones closest to him. Like Marion herself, he values only the intellect and selectively ignores anything that might trouble him. In one memory, we learn that he forced Marion’s brother, Paul (played by Stephen Mailer as a young man), to work at a monotonous job in a paper factory to earn enough money to send Marion to Bryn Mawr. Her father despises his son for valuing his emotions more than his intelligence, and makes it clear that he will not allow Marion to make the same mistake.
In his entry on Rilke in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, J. P. Stern describes Rilke’s image of the Angel:
He is a messenger (angelos) from another sphere; hence there must be one who sent him. But the angel comes upon us with a terrible majesty and strength which to us who are weak is all his own. In many such astonishing images Rilke expresses the “pure [=necessary] contradiction” that he sees as the root of our being: only by living in total commitment to “the Earth,” the here and now, can man transform it into “the heart’s inner space,” and thus wrest some eventual transition into a “soundless” Beyond—wrest it from he knows not whom. The most accomplished practitioner of such transformations is Orpheus, the poet-maker who, in the creative act, stills all strife by transforming it into song…. Rilke’s poetry is not necessarily esoteric, and the creative activity he extolled is closely related to the poetic; but he addressed himself to the single individual. The social sphere of modern life is branded as wholly inauthentic (Rilke either ignored or briefly satirized it); all concerted action is an escape from defective selfhood [Edwards, 1972, vol. 7, p. 201].
Echoing Rilke’s concern for the individual, Allen has Hope’s psychiatrist respond to her worries about the problems of the world by telling her: “Don’t worry about humanity. Get your own life in order.” Hope’s appearance as an anguished, weeping, pregnant woman may not initially suggest “majesty and strength” in contrast with Marion’s controlled, successful professor; but, from the viewpoints of Rilke, Heidegger, and Allen, it requires more strength to confront one’s inner fears and feelings than to lock them away. In this sense, and in her impact upon Marion, whom she literally brings to the place where her life will be forever changed (the restaurant where she discovers Ken with Lydia), Hope acts very much like the angel of Rilke’s poetry. In addition, Hope’s name and her pregnancy symbolize the positive impact she has upon Marion, who ends the film filled with her own sense of hope and a rebirth of her own feelings and aspirations.
Further, Hope’s pregnancy relates to Marion’s greatest regret: her decision to abort the child that her first husband wanted so badly. We learn that, in traditional Allen fashion, Marion’s first husband, Sam (Phillip Bosco), was her philosophy professor and mentor. In one riveting scene between Sam and Marion, she gives him a birthday present of a white mask which fits perfectly over her own face. We watch as he kisses her longingly through the mask. According to Nietzsche, Rilke, and Heidegger, too many of us hide our most powerful feelings behind a mask of indifference. Marion did just that when she had her abortion without even discussing it with Sam, who she knew longed for a child. Her excuse at the time was her commitment to her work, but in the restaurant scene, she confesses to Hope that her real reason for getting the abortion was her fear that having a child might elicit powerful feelings from within her, feelings of which she was terrified.
Her only opportunity to experience any of the emotions of parenthood has come from her relationship with Laura (Martha Plimpton), her teenaged stepdaughter. Early in the film we learn that Laura is closer to Marion than she is to her own parents. Marion is able to convince Laura to stay with her mother even when her father’s words to the same effect have no influence on her. Laura is caught, just as Marion was, between an emotional mother whose feelings frighten her, and a cold, distant father whose expectations overwhelm her. To Laura, Marion seems the perfect role model, a strong, successful woman who, at least initially, seems to have a successful marriage.
Marion encourages Laura to emulate her, taking her to visit her own father, now in his eighties and living alone, in the old family house. The visit is what one would expect, with her father (John Houseman) announcing that he prefers to live alone, seeing only his housekeeper and, once a year, the other members of the board of the Smithsonian Institution. Even after all these years, he still speaks angrily about his son, Paul, and he condemns Marion for occasionally slipping him money. When Laura tries to break the gloomy atmosphere of the visit by lightly asking him if he hopes to fall in love and marry again, he demonstrates his dim view of all emotions, especially love, by saying that he hopes that at his age he has become immune to such feelings. Later, Marion rebukes Laura for asking such a frivolous question, reinforcing her attempt to mold Laura into a copy of herself.
We learn that Marion has accidentally discovered Laura making love with her boyfriend, Scott (Josh Hamilton), in a cabin before a roaring fire. Although she didn’t intervene, we hear Laura tell Scott that her awareness of the fact that Marion saw them was enough to transform their lovemaking from something beautiful and romantic into something sleazy and cheap. As Marion listens, we hear Laura tell Scott that although she thinks Marion is great, she also finds her to be very judgmental, and she worries that Marion talks about her to others with the same disdain she brings to any discussion about Paul. Marion realizes that her influence is having an undesirable effect upon Laura, devaluing her sense of romance and poetry just as Marion’s father devalued those feelings in herself.
At the film’s end, when Marion meets Laura after her breakup with Ken, she is happy to learn that Laura has retained her own character, feelings and all. She tells Marion that she was not really shocked by the collapse of the marriage as it never seemed quite right to her. Hearing this, Marion realizes that Laura’s perceptions, grounded in her emotive intuitions, are more accurate their her own, forcibly shorn of all emotion. This insight helps her to discover that she may have as much to learn from Laura as Laura has to learn from her. Marion is pleased when Laura assures her that the split with her father will not change their relationship. In fact, given Marion’s new commitment to honesty, and Laura’s strained relations with both of her birth parents, we suspect that their connection will now deepen rather than dissipate.
Marion’s relationship to Paul is key to her transformation into an authentic, feeling person. As already noted, their father rejected Paul as a young man, forcing him to work in his cousin Andrew’s paper factory to raise enough money for Marion’s college tuition. This pivotal sacrifice, made unwillingly, tainted the sibling relationship for decades. Despite Paul’s crucial contribution to Marion’s eventual professional success, she adopted her father’s lack of respect for him, treating him horribly while pretending to herself that they were very close.
Early in the film, we see Marion meet briefly with Lynn (Frances Conroy), Paul’s then-estranged wife. With her father’s impatient disdain, Marion refuses to talk with Lynn because she arrived late for their meeting. Despite the fact that Marion has no pressing engagement (she is only going to her apartment to write), she forces Lynn to humiliate herself by quickly revealing her request for money. When Marion asks her why Paul didn’t come to her himself with the request, Lynn tells her that Paul despises her, especially when he must degrade himself by asking for her help. Marion refuses to accept this truth, turning her head to look around her like an animal searching for a way to escape a dangerous trap.
Marion claims to hardly know Lynn, a situation for which Lynn blames Marion, who has repeatedly rebuffed Lynn’s attempts to know her better. Marion is not disturbed by the impending breakup of her brother’s marriage. She neither offers her sympathies nor asks if she can help. Later, we learn that Lynn and Paul were able to reconcile, while, in the interim, Marion and Ken irreversibly split. We realize, along with Marion, that a marriage based primarily on emotion may, in the long run, be more stable than one based on the supposedly firmer foundation of a shared intellectualism.
At the height of her inner turmoil, after hearing Laura describe her judgmental tone when discussing Paul, Marion finds herself unable to work and in need of fresh air. Like Mickey in Hannah, she wanders the streets interminably until she finds herself at Paul’s office. When Paul asks her what she is doing there, she is unable to say. Paul, more in touch with her feelings than she is herself, tells her that something must be wrong, that she must need something, since she only comes to him when she needs something.
At this she acknowledges her need and asks him to tell her honestly why they have grown so far apart. He reminds her of an incident in which he showed her something he had written, and he recites the very words she used to dismiss its worth:
This is overblown, it’s too emotional, it’s maudlin. This may be meaningful to you, but to the objective observer it’s so embarrassing.
Understandably, Paul tells her, after this experience he avoided her presence to save her from embarrassment and himself from the pain of rejection by a sister he both idolized and feared. Confused and unsettled by this revelation, Marion is unable to stay in Paul’s presence. Later, however, after her split with Ken, she returns to ask if she can spend more time with him and his family, an offer which Paul accepts by tenderly placing his hand on her shoulder.
The image of Marion as a trapped animal is explicitly raised in the film’s references to Rilke’s poem “The Panther.” As a teenager, Marion wrote an essay in which she claimed that the caged panther was frightened by its glimpse of death outside of its cage. However, in a vision late in the film, Marion sees the caged panther followed by a shot of the white mask she wore in front of Sam. Thus the panther also represents Marion’s pent-up emotions, which she is able to keep under control only by wearing the white plaster mask. In the film’s final shot, Marion is shown dressed completely in black, identifying her with the panther at last released from its cage (Yacowar, 1991, p. 269).
Another of Marion’s crucial relationships is with Claire (Sandy Dennis), the best friend of her youth. Immediately after thinking of Claire, Marion miraculously runs into her and her husband coming out of the theater where Claire is performing in a play. As with her brother, Marion claims to have only just realized how long they have gone without seeing one another. But Claire seems uncomfortable at Marion’s appearance and claims not to have time for a drink. However, her husband, Donald (Kenneth Welsh), obviously curious about Marion, insists that they go.
Marion and Donald talk animatedly in a bar as he flatters her for her achievements, and she reciprocates by praising his recent staging of Mother Courage. When she gets him to agree that the play’s translation was atrocious, while maintaining that his staging was wonderful, Claire, who has excluded herself from their conversation, explodes in anger. Claire accuses Marion of flirting shamelessly with her husband and tells Marion that they didn’t gradually lose touch with one another; Claire purposely cut off all connections with her because Marion once seduced a man named David away from Claire, only to then reject his attentions. Like Stephanie in September, Marion has made a practice of betraying her best friend by competing for the attention of the men who interest her friend, even though Marion herself has no genuine desire to get involved with them.
Late in the film, but before Marion has discovered Ken’s infidelity with Lydia, the two couples go out for an evening of music and food. At the restaurant, a woman at another table interrupts them to tell Marion that she was a student of hers twenty years ago and that the experience changed her life. She especially remembers a lecture Marion gave on “Ethics and Moral Responsibility.” Ken beams with pride and Mark and Lydia praise her for the impact she’s had on others, yet Marion is clearly more disturbed than pleased.
By this point, she is unable to sleep at night and unable to write during the day. It is in this state that she has her most important and lengthiest vision. In it, she enters the psychiatrist’s office as Hope is leaving. The psychiatrist asks Marion for her diagnosis of Hope’s condition and, clearly referring more to herself than Hope, she responds:
MARION: Self-deception.
PSYCHIATRIST: Good. It’s a little general.
MARION: But I don’t think she can part with her lies.
PSYCHIATRIST: No? Too bad.
MARION: Not that she doesn’t want to.
PSYCHIATRIST: It’s precisely that she doesn’t want to. When she wants to, she will.
MARION: It’s all happening so fast.
PSYCHIATRIST: I have to hurry. I’m trying to prevent her from killing herself.
MARION: You don’t think she would?
PSYCHIATRIST: She’s already begun.
MARION: She has?
PSYCHIATRIST: Oh, not very dramatically. That’s not her style. She’s doing it slowly and methodically and has been since she was very young. Now, if you’ll pardon me, I have another patient.
The next patient turns out to be her father. She listens as he admits his regrets: that he didn’t spend his life with the woman he loved most deeply, that he’s been a bad father both to Paul and herself, and that he wasted his life pursuing an academic prominence which he now realizes was “stupid” and demanded too little from him.
She next finds herself walking down the street in front of the theater where she ran into Claire. In the theater, Marion encounters Hope, who invites her to stay. Marion discovers that she has interrupted a rehearsal of a play about her own life, a play directed by Donald (whose staging she admired), and starring Claire as herself. She watches as Claire and Ken play scenes dramatizing the shallowness of her marriage. When Ken tells Marion/Claire that she tossed and turned in her sleep repeating the name “Larry,” Marion is overwhelmed with feelings of “melancholia and longing.”
Larry appears and holds hands with Claire, who is now playing the role of his wife. Marion interrogates him, learning that he is happily living in Santa Fe, although his wife concedes that he expresses a longing to return to New York. When she leaves Marion and Larry to talk, he asks Marion if she’s read his novel in which he based one of his characters on her, a character named Helinka. After telling her that he has a daughter whom he deeply loves—a revelation which draws the camera’s attention to the face of Hope, the expectant mother—Larry leaves to join his wife, who “needs” to show him a beautiful sunset. Marion clearly wishes someone needed her in that way. She sadly realizes that Larry could have been that person once, but not anymore.
Although she wants to go home, Donald urges her to stay for their “big second-act finale,” the suicide of Marion’s first husband, Sam. At first she denies his death was a suicide until Sam begins to talk directly to her from a stool under a single bright spotlight. Sam explains that their marriage, like so many of Allen’s Pygmalion-Galatea relationships, was one in which Sam was the teacher who molded the “dazzling” young female student. Their joy in the relationship lasted only so long as he still had things to teach her. When she had absorbed all he had to give her, then, he tells us, she felt “suffocated” and had to get away (just like Annie and so many others). Ironically, he reveals, fifteen years after their divorce, when Sam killed himself with a combination of pills and alcohol, his cause of death was listed as “suffocation.”
Unable to take any more, Marion leaves, but we don’t see her actually wake up from her dream. The line between fantasy and reality is as thin here as it is in Stardust Memories. Sandy Bates and Marion Post both view the world initially through filters of self-deception which distort their views. Unlike Bates, however, who only falls further into madness and despair as the film develops, Marion, through the intervention of Hope (pun intended), is able to regenerate herself and begin again authentically.
When Marion discovers Hope crying in the back of a musty antique store under Gustav Klimt’s painting of a pregnant woman (also named “Hope”), she is led first to a gallery, where they “marvel” at more of Klimt’s work, and then to the restaurant where she discovers Ken’s infidelity. Klimt’s art is from the same period as Rilke’s poetry, and it evokes similar sensations of melancholia and a nostalgia for the spirituality of a lost romanticism in which we can no longer believe.
In the film’s final scene, a rejuvenated Marion successfully works on her book—the story that we have just experienced, rather than the abstract philosophical opus she started out to write. During a break, she looks up Larry’s account of their involvement in his novel. She reads with pleasure his description of her as someone who was “capable of intense passion if she would one day just allow herself to feel.” We see her sitting at her desk with the book in her hands as we hear her voice-over:
I closed the book and felt the strange mixture of wistfulness and hope, and I wondered if a memory is something you have or something you’ve lost. For the first time in a long time, I felt at peace.
As the credits roll, the answer to her question is clear. She had lost her precious memory of Larry’s effect upon her along with all of the other emotions she had hidden within herself. While her process of transformation has involved much anguish, at its conclusion she is sufficiently whole to regain her most valued memory, which she may now cherish. She has also gained a peace of mind which will, we suspect, allow her to respond the next time she has the opportunity to create an authentic relationship with a man.
Another Woman is Allen’s most complex and subtle film to date. Although it makes heavy demands on its audience, it rewards real effort with a sophisticated portrait of the process by which someone chooses to become inauthentic, and the corresponding suffering required for that person to retrieve her soul. Rather than simply attacking inauthenticity blindly, with no attempt to understand how it comes about (as he might be accused of doing in earlier films), here Allen empathetically reveals its origins and points to the possibility of redemption even for those who at first glance appear to have fallen farthest. In his next full-length film, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Allen will move even more deeply into inauthenticity’s abyss.