For two years, reviewing theatre and cinema, I've managed to avoid the use of the word 'Art', because I believe that the word has come to signify little more than some vague cultural blessing and that there are other more specific criteria by which we can judge what any particular play or film is actually doing. But there's no avoiding Art with Woody Allen's new film Interiors…. After moving from the first phase of satiric farce with the poignant comedy of Annie Hall, Allen now strips off the joker's mask completely and reveals the face of the tortured artist beneath. But the face is not Woody Allen's, but Ingmar Bergman's. The debt to Bergman shows not only in the film's formal qualities, its austere composition and self-conscious elegance, but in its themes of personal isolation and death, and crucially in its attitude to art, which is seen as something refined, exquisite and in a sense inhuman. The story concerns a well-heeled WASP family in New England…. Arthur is a quiet, decent, responsible sort of man, while Eve is the perfect wife and mother—a little tense and introverted, perhaps, but then she's an artist. If Arthur provides the loot, she provides the aesthetic sense that makes their home a model of gracious affluence. (pp. 38-9)
The contrast between Eve and the new wife, Pearl … is at the heart of the film, Pearl is described by Joey as a 'vulgarian', and I suppose she is in the sense that her responses are simple and uncomplicated, more sensual than cerebral, and taste to her is a function of the tongue and not of the sensibility. She likes eating and drinking, and music and dancing, and she wows the boys with card tricks—in other words, she's a lot of fun, and that's something Arthur has had very little of. If for Arthur she represents an escape from bourgeois respectability, for Woody Allen she seems to offer an alternative to the neurotic, self-conscious, obsessive figure of the artist—or at least of his type of artist.
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