Another Woman- 1988 Woody Allen film

It’s a weird gem, it has grown on me over the years. One of Sandy Dennis’s last films.

R1- And her scene is one of the standouts. She was awesome.

The ending stays with me- its pretty simple, moving , and hopeful.

And Gena looked so beautiful in that last shot (In the rest of film she looked a little older and pale- and I think this was on purpose)

I thought the film was a fucking bore when I was younger, but its really solid.

Loved the chemistry between Martha Plimpton and Gena, you have the whatshername scene at the party *The CATS/Carrie chick, there's a lot of great stuff in what appears to be a quiet and cerebral film.

I love this movie, which surprised me since "Wild Strawberries" (which inspired it) is one of my least favorite Bergman films.

I love this film but Gena’s character reminds me so much of my mother it makes me uncomfortable. She’s as full of herself and delusional as the character.

I seem to recall us doing this one before but it doesn't appear in a Google search. Much was made of Sandy Dennis in the film.

Woody seemed to like having his women wearing their hair in braids. Gena, Judy Davis in Husband &Wives, Mia.

I used to have the poster.

But who is in the center box?

[quote]But who is in the center box?

another woman

I accept your condemnation.

R4- But that's why I like the film so much. She actually learns some lessons and changes- I think that's why its so satisfying...

The character learns some lessons and tries to make things right..

But yes, she is like your mother for 90% of the film.

Hah! And R10 the film does have some (or many) campy lines- not on the level of Interiors, but it has a few howlers.

With Betty Buckley as the discarded wife.

It's a beautiful film. "Another Woman" is just one of the reasons I love Woody Allen films and always have. I love the funny ones, I love the serious ones, I love them all. He's a brilliant filmmaker.

The Panther

His vision, from the constantly passing bars, has grown so weary that it cannot hold anything else. It seems to him there are a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.

As he paces in cramped circles, over and over, the movement of his powerful soft strides is like a ritual dance around a center in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.

Only at times, the curtain of the pupils lifts, quietly--. An image enters in, rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles, plunges into the heart and is gone.

Here's Betty B's scene. She appears from 1.32.

Mia is pregnant in it, carrying Ronan.

It's funny how the music stops when Betty appears and starts again after she leaves.

Like Interiors and September Woody trying to become Bergman is a bore

By Joe Brown Washington Post Staff Writer November 04, 1988

'But it's all so painstakingly composed and unrelentingly beige that "Another Woman" is occasionally enervating, and ends up missing its own point about really living life. And Allen's stiff, scripted-sounding Serious Talk -- these folks chat the way writers write, and it's sometimes hard to stomach -- provokes some unplanned laughter.'

I saw that thing. Crap-ola.

One of my favorite movies. I find it terribly moving but agree that it’s an acquired taste. I didn’t come to love it until years after it was released.

I’m also biased - I’m the same age as Martha Plimpton and grew up in Manhattan. It reminds me of the city of my youth - and my parents and their friends (though not as pretentious) many of whom have died.

R13- I know that this is referenced in the film.. Is it in the scene with Mia in that Antique store?

Now I have to go find this..

Marion finds her mother's book of poetry.

This movie was supposed to star Dianne Wiest as Hope and Mia as Marion, then Mia got pregnant and they switched roles before Dianne dropped out. Jane Alexander was cast in her place before being replaced with Gena. Mary Steenburgen filmed scenes but they were all cut. Beyond trying to imitate Bergman, it was Woody's insane perfectionism during the late '80s (re-writing/re-shooting/re-casting) that did him in.

Oh brother. More Ingmar Bergman Lite from Mr. Allen.

Dianne is only 3 years younger than Mia so if their age difference would not have been as wide as Mia and Gena. Gena is 15 years older than Mia.

I remember liking it. I may rewatch it today.

Hey. Hey, Hey. Look at me once in a while. I'm your wife, not her.

In her book Mia writes that Woody got the idea of Marion overhearing the psychiatric sessions from next door from something that happened to her. She said when she initially told Woody of the phenomenon he replied, Would you want to be defined as someone who would do something like that?

Woody at his best. Betty and Sandy are brilliant in their short roles.

“I work in a paper box factory.”

This is perhaps my favorite Woody Allen film and Gena Rowlands is just sensational. The character of Marion is so far away from the wild, grand, idiosyncratic women I tend to associate her with due to her work with Cassavetes -- here she shows she can work as tautly and economically as anyone else, suggesting a deeply controlled personality without indulging in the kind of showy mannerisms that might indicate too broadly to the audience that this woman is tightly wound.

She is my Best Actress winner of 1988, and I would also nominate Sandy Dennis.

R30 i imagine Gena must’ve placed at least in the bottom of the 10 for the Oscars and the lead actress category, considering Allen and his actors got nominated a lot. Sandy maybe too. Sandy should’ve definitely got in, and I would’ve replaced Sigourney with Sandy. I think Weavers work in Working Girl is highly overrated, but she had a big year with Gorillas In The Mist, and WG was a hit.

One of my absolute favorite films. I've watched it many times and am always moved by Marion's story and awakening. It's just beautiful and the performances are excellent all around.

I must have seemed very bland to him after he met you.

This is one of my favorite movies, certainly in the top three. I saw it in my late twenties and it was that rare thing, a movie that made me reconsider my life. Odd, i know, since the main character is fifty. Unlike other Woody Allen movies it has a very specific message.

There are great scenes, the part with Sandy Dennis telling that it was not life that drew them apart but a decision from her, the confrontation with her sister in law who tells her how her brother actually feels about her and the devastating part where she overhears Mia telling about their meeting ‘I met a really said woman today’. The ending makes me cry.

OP- Then you must have liked her as the mother of Aiden Quinn in An Early Frost (1985). She was SO good in that movie.

Youngish Frances Conroy as Marion's sister in law is another standout. Gena was good but I would loved to have seen Jane Alexander as Marion.

I love this movie. I used to work with a lot of young actors studying at HB Studios and this was frequently a movie I gave them to watch.

This is the best of the three polarizing super-serious films from Allen's writing/directing prime, the others being Interiors and September.

If I were to watch it today, I'd probably find things to criticize I didn't notice when I saw it as a young person, when it was released on video in 1989. These Allen dramas that were indebted to Bergman always had stiff-sounding dialogue and seemed overly schematic and diagrammed, as if Allen were aspiring to a creative temperament that wasn't his own. But this is the one that has the most messy life in it (the flashback to the abandoned wife showing up at the party, Sandy Dennis's eruption at her director husband in the bar), and as usual, he had a fantastic cast.

I remember a previous DL thread that criticized Rowlands as miscast, but I think her Marion belongs on a list of her great performances. It is completely unlike the roles she had played before for her husband, and later for other filmmakers, but she makes me believe she's this severe, repressed intellectual. It suggests a different path she could have taken, had she not been typecast as coarse, blowsy broads.

David Ogden Stiers does an awesome "younger John Houseman," too.

David Ogden Stiers ALSO did a very good Charles Emerson Winchester.

Glad to see this movie still getting some DL love. A very underrated Woody film. At the time, condemned as "Bergman lite", but now all these decades later appearing a kind of minor classic. Everyone in the cast is perfection, including an uncredited Gene Hackman.

“I gave you a beautiful name - Helinka”

Jane Alexander is more of a Gustav than a Helinka.

Gene Hackman is credited.

I love this film, and it does speak to me as I've hit 40 and beyond.

The music was perfection.

Did Gena dye her hair or wear a wig?

I watched Woody's Bergmaneque movies as comedies. They are so thirsty and ridiculous. But then I don't like Bergman movies.

[quote]Did Gena dye her hair or wear a wig?

I don't think she's wearing a wig. Her hair is the length and color it was in two movies immediately before this one, The Betty Ford Story and Light of Day (the latter as the dying mom to Joan Jett and Michael J. Fox). It's just more tightly coiffed.

lol thirsty

Watched for the first time yesterday. Loved it

Sandy Dennis was robbed of a Best Supporting nom.