Woody Allen, since 1971, if no farther back, had thirsted to make what he thought of as a "European" film, preferably in the monastic style of Ingmar Bergman. Finally he has made it, and contingently it resembles (at least in outline) the particular Bergman number [Autumn Sonata] which arrived almost at the same hour of release. (p. 60)
Impressed by the austerity of Bergman's style and by what he reads as Bergman's tragic view of life, he endangered his project at the outset; he was faced with the problem of imposing a Swedish ethos on urban American material. Bergman, since The Virgin Spring, has as often as possible shut out not only the world of nature but also the world of things and the world of society at large, so that his agonists can battle nakedly with each other (or with a surrogate God), undistracted by the alternative points of view or the cultural frivolities which tempt the commonality of mankind. Allen's film is far more populous than Autumn Sonata or any late film of Bergman; our comprehension of it is not delayed by a level of symbolic reference; it can be summarized as a story line that holds together. Motivation, however, is another matter. If Autumn Sonata is ambivalent because Bergman is playing a game with appearances, Interiors is eventually ambiguous because the calamities represented are in excess of the cause alleged.
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