Film

Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)

Director: Woody Allen

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

Allen's previous three films (Zelig, Broadway Danny Rose,The Purple Rose of Cairo) were thin, clever sketches fleshed out with characteristic one-liners. Here he returns to the territory he knows best, Manhattan. Of the three sisters (this is very much Chekhov landscape), the youngest (Hershey) lives with a spiritual mentor (Von Sydow), an intellectual recluse who rails against the iniquities of modern culture. The middle one (Wiest) is a frantic urban neurotic, forever borrowing money to pursue her latest career whim. And the eldest (Farrow) is apparently the most stable, a successful actress and mother presiding over a warm family circle. All is not well, however; Farrow's husband (Caine) is pursuing an affair with the youngest sister; sibling rivalry is rife. Wandering in and out of this extended dissection of family love life is Allen himself, playing his familiar nebbish hypochondriac; when a medical crisis brings him uncomfortably close to death, he samples all the different religions, before turning to the Marx Brothers' films as evidence that life is to be enjoyed. It is an articulate, literate film, full of humanity and perception about its sometimes less-than-loveable characters, which nonetheless comes down on the side of the best things in life: the primacy of love and feeling, qualified hope, and the fragility of it all. It also returns to much of the humour from his 'early, funny' films; Allen seems finally to have found the ability to please not just everyone, but also himself. CPea.

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