Another Woman at 38: One of Woody Allen’s Finest Films
Essay
The life you remember may not be the life you lived.
Thirty-eight years after its release, Another Woman remains one of Woody Allen’s quietest and most unsettling films. Gena Rowlands gives one of the finest performances in his work.
The overheard voice
A stranger makes Marion listen to herself.
Marion Post is a successful philosophy professor who rents an apartment where she can work undisturbed on a new book.
Through a ventilation duct, she discovers that she can hear sessions taking place in the psychiatrist’s office next door. One patient in particular, played by Mia Farrow, begins to fascinate her.
Marion listens to this stranger talking openly about fear, unhappiness and her marriage. Slowly, those private confessions begin to disturb the way Marion sees her own life.
She has spent years believing she understands herself. What follows is the gradual discovery that the people around her may know a rather different woman.
“Marion has built a life around intelligence and self-control.”
Gena Rowlands · Marion Post
Certainty disappears quietly.
The film belongs to Gena Rowlands.
Marion has spent much of her adult life treating emotion as something that can be understood, organised and contained. She is intelligent, accomplished and outwardly composed.
Rowlands never makes her transformation obvious. There is no sudden collapse. Marion simply begins to notice things she had previously managed not to see.
An old friend remembers their relationship differently. Her brother carries resentment she has underestimated. Her stepdaughter feels a distance Marion has barely acknowledged. Memories of a former relationship suggest that she may once have rejected something more emotionally honest than the life she chose.
Each encounter removes another small piece of the person Marion believes herself to be.
Rowlands’ restraint is crucial. Marion has trained herself not to reveal very much, so tiny changes in expression carry enormous weight.
Watching the film after Rowlands’ death in 2024 inevitably adds something to it. Her work with John Cassavetes contains many of her most celebrated performances, but Another Woman deserves to sit comfortably among them.
Memory and regret
Other people remember the same life differently.
Regret appears throughout Allen’s films, but Another Woman treats it with unusual severity.
Marion is not wondering what might happen next. She is looking backwards at decisions that have already hardened into a life.
People have been hurt. Relationships have ended. Opportunities have disappeared. Years have passed.
That gives the film a particular sting as you get older.
We become the narrators of our own histories. We remember why we made certain choices and gradually construct explanations that allow us to live with them.
Marion discovers that other people have been keeping their own versions.
Was she a good wife? A good friend? Did she choose security when she could have chosen love? Has intelligence sometimes allowed her to avoid emotion rather than understand it?
Allen does not tidy those questions up for her.
“Other people remember the same life differently.”
Bergman · Sven Nykvist
The influence becomes Allen’s own.
The influence of Ingmar Bergman is impossible to miss. Wild Strawberries is the clearest reference point: another film about an accomplished person forced to examine the emotional consequences of a life already largely lived.
There is also a direct connection through cinematographer Sven Nykvist.
Nykvist photographed many of Bergman’s greatest films, including Persona, Cries and Whispers and Fanny and Alexander.
His photography gives Another Woman its restrained, autumnal appearance. Interiors are uncluttered. Faces dominate. Nothing fights for our attention.
Allen had already made an openly Bergman-influenced drama with Interiors ten years earlier. I think Another Woman works better.
By 1988, the influence feels absorbed rather than borrowed. The New York intellectual world, the anxiety about missed choices and the suspicion that intelligence offers little protection from emotional failure all feel completely at home in Allen’s work.
The people around Marion
Every conversation removes another defence.
Ian Holm gives Marion’s husband Ken a controlled distance that makes him difficult to read at first.
Gene Hackman appears as Larry, a man from Marion’s past whose presence becomes increasingly important as she considers the life she might have chosen.
Mia Farrow has the unusual task of playing a character whose voice is almost more important than her physical presence. Her private confessions become an accidental challenge to Marion’s carefully ordered existence.
Martha Plimpton, John Houseman and Blythe Danner each provide another small piece of evidence that Marion’s version of herself is incomplete.
Allen resists turning these encounters into grand confrontations. Marion receives fragments. She has to assemble the picture herself.
Another Woman · 1988
One of the strongest films of Allen’s 1980s.
Another Woman has never had the popular reputation of Annie Hall, Manhattan, Hannah and Her Sisters or Midnight in Paris.
That is understandable. It is hardly the film I would choose as somebody’s introduction to Woody Allen.
Once you know his work, though, it becomes much more interesting.
It appeared during an extraordinary period. Hannah and Her Sisters, Radio Days and September had all arrived in the previous two years. Crimes and Misdemeanors would follow in 1989.
Allen was moving between comedy, drama and fantasy at remarkable speed. Another Woman may be the most concentrated example of his serious dramatic work from the decade.
There is very little in it that feels unnecessary.
Thirty-eight years later
We know
ourselves
too late.
At 38, the film has barely dated because its central question has barely dated.
What happens when the story you have spent years telling yourself about your own life no longer seems entirely true?
Marion is given the chance to recognise that before it is too late. Whether recognition is enough is another matter.
That is one of the reasons I keep returning to Another Woman. It does not offer Marion an easy redemption or pretend that understanding your mistakes somehow erases them.
She can only see herself a little more clearly than she did before.
For a film this quiet, it leaves a surprisingly long shadow.