Sister Routes

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. I went to The Criterion Channel's Family Reunion playlist last night and picked out the best looking one, Woody Allen's 1986 film Hannah and Her Sisters. It's a comedy about relationships set in New York, which of course describes a lot of Woody Allen movies. This one's more of an ensemble piece than usual and although Allen himself plays a role, he's not the sole point of view character as he typically is.

The title characters are Hannah, played by Mia Farrow, and her two sisters, Holly (Dianne Wiest) and Lee (Barbara Hershey). As the film opens, we're treated to a narration by Elliot, Hannah's husband, played by Michael Caine, who's secretly in love with Lee, or believes he is. He's possibly a stand-in for Allen himself, as in other Allen movies in which Allen himself doesn't star. In any case, it was the first time I ever thought Michael Caine bore some resemblance to Woody Allen.

Allen plays a television producer named Mickey who's Hannah's ex-husband. He's a hypochondriac and much of his subplot concerns his anxiety over the possibility that he has a brain tumour.

According to Wikipedia, the film was influenced by Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander, and I was indeed reminded of the Bergman film at the beginning of Hannah and her Sisters, which depicts many of the characters gathering for a Thanksgiving party, much as the characters in Fanny and Alexander gather for Christmas. Unlike Fanny and Alexander, Hannah and Her Sisters has Max von Sydow in a small role. The man who'd starred in so many famous Bergman films had been unable or unwilling to return for his old friend's elegiac effort that was supposed to be a kind of summation of Bergman's career. But here he was, a couple years later, in a film by Bergman's admirer, Woody Allen.

Von Sydow plays Lee's husband and he tells her directly that Elliot's been "lusting" after her. She knows too, of course, but she hasn't put it so bluntly to herself in the thoughts we hear in her narration, she just ruminates on how Elliot blushed when speaking to her and calls it a "crush". I guess that's ultimately what unites the two sides of the film, an exercise in bad faith in the Satre-ian sense of the term. In one plot, two people engage in an affair who aren't honest with themselves about their intentions and, in the other, a man obsesses with illness he has little reason to suspect he actually has.

Hannah herself is a small role, being the calm centre of the storm. Carrie Fisher has a small but effective role as a family friend.

Hannah and Her Sisters is available on The Criterion Channel.