Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)
Constructed
in short chapters, with a rainbows spectrum of characters taking
turns as narrators, Hannah and Her Sisters paints a picture
of contemporary New York life, exposing sadness and joy and the
ritual of self-discovery in every brushstroke.
The plot spreads over three Thanksgivings at the spacious
Central Park West apartment of Hannah (Farrow), with she and her
sisters Lee (Hershey) and Holly (Wiest) as the centrepieces.
The children of Bohemian show-biz parents who spar endlessly
and endure their children's crises superficially, the girls are
rivals, friends, and catalysts, and in two years of their lives we
encounter a smorgasbord of survival techniques that could not
happen anywhere else but a planet unto itself like the island of
Manhattan.
Hannah is an actress who would give it up in a second to have
babies. She's divorced from Mickey (Woody Allen), has had twins by
artificial insemination from his ex-writing partner and is now
married to Elliot (Michael Caine in his Oscar-winning Best
Supporting Actor role), a successful financial adviser with keen
business acumen but not much substance.
Elliot loves Hannah's cool, controlled (and slightly flaky)
domestic grip on reality, but he lusts after her beautiful,
erotic, unfocused sister, Lee, who lives with a brooding,
depressed, cynical painter (Von Sydow) who is always threatening
to kill himself.
But the queen of neurosis is Holly - A cocaine sniffing,
chain-smoking, anxiety-ridden dilettante who is into ESP, punk
rock, and drugs and has failed at everything. Since Holly can't
get an acting job, she opens the Stanislavski Catering Service
with her pushy, competitive girlfriend April (Fisher). Dianne
Wiest won the 1986 Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of
Holly.
Hannah holds everything together with a maternal perfection
that infuriates everyone. Her self-assurance is unnerving,
especially to her ex-husband Mickey, who is an ulcer-ridden
hypochondriac who wafts through the streets of New York between Saturday
Night Live and various hospital testing labs (he is convinced
he's dying).
Mickey also tries everything - He even converts from Judaism to
Catholicism. He is actually so depressed that he would like to
kill himself . . . but his parents would be so devastated that he
"would have to kill them first to spare them the
humiliation".
Hannah is a valentine or love letter from Woody Allen to the
whole neurotic world - A painfully accurate and richly comic
masterpiece, which is probably Woody's most complex yet most
accessible film (No wonder critics treated it like the second
coming).
TRIVIA NOTES
Hannah's apartment in the film was really Mia Farrow's own on
Central Park West, NY, while some of the children in her Mother
Goose nursery are her own children (natural, adopted, and
surrogate).
Her mother in the film, a once-beautiful actress still charged
with vitality and charm, is played by Maureen O'Sullivan - Mia's
real-life mother.
|
