Intérieurs

This is one of those films that when you recommend, you should also warn.It is a very mature work about a very sick and warped family. It is also a very beautifully realized piece of filmmaking. The only real complaint I have about it is that it wasn't recorded in stereo or surround. Since Woody Allen is deaf in one ear, I guess he doesn't care. Thank God, he isn't color blind. Geraldine Page is absolutely devastating as the suffocating wife as she creates the woman of limited imagination and total self importance who strangles the joy of living out of her immediate family. She is a pathetic villain whose sick arrogance is the bane of every one she touches with her sterile iciness. This is a cautionary tale about what mental illness can do if left unchecked and untreated. It is also Woody Allen doing Bergman like Stanley Donen doing Hitchcock in Charade, not a lesser film than Bergman, just an American take on the same kind of situation. Bergman is not as good as Bergman. Every Good filmmaker gets elevated to such outrageous levels of hype in this disturbingly stupid era of 100 best lists that a lot of very good movies get ignored and filmmakers of previous eras are treated like trash, so that a self promoting cretin like Tarantino whose films are all style and absolutely zero substance can be lionized by a bunch of film school educated idiotic critics. This is not a must see, but it is an important film for the film scholar. As much as Enchanted April is life affirming, this one is life threatening. Talked to death has never been done better.