September (1987)
Film Overview
During the final days of summer, six people gather at a Vermont country house where old wounds, unreturned love and buried family secrets gradually surface.
Mia Farrow plays Lane, who has been living quietly at the house while recovering from a difficult period in her life. Her friend Stephanie, played by Dianne Wiest, has spent the summer with her, taking time away from her husband and children.
Nearby lives Howard, a university professor played by Denholm Elliott, who has fallen deeply in love with Lane. Lane, however, is interested in Peter, an aspiring writer played by Sam Waterston. Peter’s attention has increasingly shifted towards Stephanie.
The emotional balance becomes even more unstable when Lane’s mother, celebrated actress Diane Frasier, arrives with her husband Lloyd. Elaine Stritch plays Diane as a forceful, charismatic woman whose glamorous past conceals a painful secret that has shaped Lane’s life since adolescence.
Allen keeps almost the entire drama inside the country house. A summer storm, a power cut, piano music and conversations stretching late into the evening gradually expose what each character wants and how little control any of them has over whether those feelings will be returned.
Although set in Vermont, September was filmed entirely at Kaufman Astoria Studios in Queens. Santo Loquasto’s house set and Carlo Di Palma’s warm photography create the illusion of an isolated country home surrounded by darkness, rain and late-summer air.
Watch September
My Review
The last days of summer
September is one of the quietest films Woody Allen ever made, and I think that quietness is the key to appreciating it. Almost nothing here is trying to compete for our attention. Six people, one country house and a few late-summer days are enough.
The film feels closer to a chamber play than to most conventional cinema. People enter rooms, sit down, talk, leave, return and discover that while they have been thinking about one person, somebody else has been thinking about them. The dramatic movement comes almost entirely from desire travelling in the wrong direction.
Howard loves Lane. Lane wants Peter. Peter wants Stephanie. Stephanie is married and knows perfectly well that wanting something is not the same as being free to take it. Around them, Diane and Lloyd carry the history of another generation into the house.
That arrangement could easily feel mechanical, but Allen makes it sad rather than clever. There is nothing amusing about discovering that the person you want is looking past you towards somebody else, and September is unusually patient with the humiliation and disappointment involved.
Everyone in September seems to be standing beside the person who loves them while looking across the room at somebody else.
Mia Farrow’s Lane is the emotional centre of the film, and it is a difficult performance because so much of what matters is internal. Lane has spent months trying to recover some stability. The house has become a refuge, but it is a temporary one. She wants to sell it, return to New York and begin working as a photographer again.
There is something hopeful in that plan. Lane is trying to imagine a future, and Peter becomes part of that imagined future almost without his consent. He has encouraged her, shared his writing with her and slept with her once earlier in the summer. For Lane, those things have acquired emotional significance that Peter no longer shares.
Farrow is very good at showing the danger of that imbalance. Lane is not foolish enough to believe she has a guaranteed relationship with Peter, but she wants the signs to mean more than they do. She is watching him for evidence that her hope is justified, and every small gesture can therefore become either reassurance or catastrophe.
What makes this particularly painful is that Peter does care about her. He admires Lane, values her judgement and appreciates the encouragement she has given his writing. The problem is not that he feels nothing. The problem is that he does not feel the thing she needs him to feel.
Lane’s tragedy is not that Peter does not care about her. It is that caring is not the same thing as loving.
Sam Waterston gives Peter a quiet uncertainty that works well against Lane’s emotional intensity. He has stepped away from advertising to try to write seriously, but even his creative ambitions are unstable. Lane believes in the novel he is writing about his father, while Peter becomes increasingly fascinated by the much more dramatic life story of Lane’s mother.
That shift is important because Diane has the kind of personality that pulls attention towards itself. She is glamorous, famous, loud and completely accustomed to being the most interesting person in the room. Elaine Stritch plays her with an energy that changes the temperature of the film almost immediately.
Diane can be funny and entertaining, but there is something exhausting about her too. She has lived intensely and expects everybody around her to accept the force of that personality. Lane has spent a lifetime living beside it, and the difference between how outsiders see Diane and how her daughter experiences her is crucial.
Peter sees a remarkable woman with a remarkable story. Lane sees the person whose choices shaped her childhood. That makes Peter’s interest in writing Diane’s biography feel almost like another betrayal. The man Lane wants is becoming fascinated by the mother from whose shadow Lane has struggled to emerge.
To Peter, Diane’s past is material for a book. To Lane, it is the past she has spent years trying to survive.
Elaine Stritch is terrific because she refuses to make Diane simply monstrous. There is vitality in her that the other characters often lack. Diane likes being alive. She enjoys people, stories, travel, attention and the possibility of another adventure. That appetite is attractive even when the consequences of her behaviour have been devastating.
The revelation about Lane’s adolescence changes everything. Diane had been involved with a violent gangster, and the accepted story was that fourteen-year-old Lane shot and killed him. During the confrontation between mother and daughter, Lane finally reveals that the public story was not the truth: Diane fired the gun and Lane repeated what the lawyers told her to say.
Suddenly Lane’s fragility has a much deeper history. She has carried responsibility for an act that was not hers, and the mother whose reputation survived has continued living with the kind of confidence Lane has never been able to acquire.
I think the scene works because Allen does not turn it into a courtroom revelation. It emerges during an argument about the house, almost as though years of buried resentment have finally found the point where they can no longer remain buried. The practical question of who owns a Vermont property opens directly into the emotional ownership of the past.
The house is supposed to give Lane a future. Diane’s arrival turns it back into a container for the past.
Dianne Wiest’s Stephanie is equally important because she introduces a different kind of dissatisfaction. She has a husband and children in Philadelphia and has spent the summer away from them. There is no suggestion that her marriage is completely destroyed. She simply needs to know that another version of herself still exists.
Peter provides that possibility. Stephanie flirts with him partly because she is attracted to him and partly because his interest reassures her that she can still be desired outside the identity of wife and mother. Wiest understands the danger of this before the character fully admits it to herself.
That makes Stephanie’s behaviour more complicated than simple disloyalty to Lane. She knows Lane is interested in Peter, and she knows she has a family waiting for her, but the attention is intoxicating. When Peter invites her to Paris, fantasy suddenly acquires a destination.
Their attraction has its own sadness because both of them understand that it probably cannot become a life. Peter wants the romance to continue beyond the summer, while Stephanie recognises that the season itself has made the affair possible. September means going home.
Stephanie’s affair belongs to summer. The arrival of September means decisions have to survive outside the mood that created them.
Denholm Elliott gives Howard perhaps the saddest position in the film. He loves Lane openly and genuinely, and almost everyone except Lane can see that he would probably treat her with greater care than Peter ever could. None of that matters because affection cannot be awarded according to merit.
Howard is intelligent enough to know this but still hopes persistence might eventually change the equation. During the power cut, helped by alcohol and darkness, he finally tells Lane how he feels. She rejects him gently, which somehow makes the scene more painful than cruelty would.
There is a temptation in romantic stories to suggest that the person who loves most faithfully ought eventually to be rewarded. Allen has never been particularly interested in that idea. Howard can be decent, attentive and emotionally available and still not be the person Lane wants.
Elliott plays that recognition beautifully. Howard does not become angry with her. He simply understands that when Lane leaves the house, the relationship he imagined will disappear with the summer.
September is ruthless about one simple fact: being the person who would love somebody best does not make you the person they will love.
Jack Warden’s Lloyd occupies a slightly different emotional space. He is Diane’s husband, a physicist and a man much more comfortable discussing the universe than the turbulent emotional histories inside the house. His presence gives the film occasional breathing room because he can look at things from a distance the others do not have.
I like the contrast between Lloyd’s interest in enormous scientific questions and the almost embarrassingly small scale of the problems consuming everyone around him. The universe may contain unimaginable mysteries, but six adults can still spend an entire evening devastated because one person loves the wrong person.
That contrast appears throughout Allen’s work. Cosmic knowledge rarely helps much when somebody wants to know whether another person will call tomorrow. Here it is treated quietly, without turning Lloyd into a philosophical spokesman.
His marriage to Diane is also revealing. He accepts her forceful personality without appearing threatened by it, and there is a stability between them that throws the younger characters’ romantic uncertainty into sharper relief.
The power-cut sequence may be the film’s finest stretch. A storm gathers outside, the electricity fails and the house is reduced to candlelight. Stephanie sits at the piano while conversations begin moving into territory that would probably have remained untouched in ordinary daylight.
Allen uses the darkness almost like permission. People become more honest because the room has changed. Howard confesses his love, Lane questions Peter about their relationship and Peter eventually tells Stephanie what he feels for her. The storm outside gives physical form to tensions that have been building quietly inside.
Music is particularly effective here because it comes from within the house rather than from a conventional dramatic score. Stephanie plays standards on the piano, and the music creates intimacy without telling us exactly what to feel. The effect is closer to being present in the room than listening to a soundtrack placed above it.
On a Slow Boat to China is the piece I associate most strongly with the film. Frank Loesser’s melody is romantic, gentle and slightly wistful, perfectly suited to characters quietly imagining lives they are unlikely ever to have.
When the lights go out, the house becomes more intimate and the characters become less able to hide from what they want.
The absence of a conventional score is a smart choice. Music appears because somebody plays the piano or puts on a record. Art Tatum and Ben Webster’s performances of My Ideal and Night and Day sit beside recordings by Ambrose and his Orchestra and Bernie Leighton’s piano performances of standards such as What’ll I Do, Moonglow and I’m Confessin’.
The song titles themselves almost seem to comment on the characters without needing to be underlined. My Ideal, Just One More Chance, What’ll I Do and I’m Confessin’ could practically serve as chapter headings for the different relationships in the house.
Yet Allen is restrained enough not to make the connection feel like a gimmick. The music creates atmosphere first. Its thematic relevance emerges naturally because these are songs already built around longing, regret and romantic uncertainty.
The result is one of the quieter soundtracks in the filmography but also one of the most integrated. Music does not arrive to enlarge the drama. It is simply part of the room in which the drama is happening.
Carlo Di Palma’s photography is equally restrained. After the rich remembered colours of Radio Days, he creates something much more enclosed here. The house is warm, but the darkness beyond its windows is almost complete. The outside world exists mainly through sound: rain, insects, weather and the suggestion of countryside.
That is particularly impressive once you know that there was no Vermont location at all. The entire film was made on soundstages at Kaufman Astoria Studios. Santo Loquasto had to design a house capable of sustaining virtually every scene while still providing enough depth, doorways and connected rooms for the camera to keep finding new compositions.
The artificiality actually benefits the film. There is nowhere else for these people to go. The country house becomes a temporary sealed world in which relationships have been allowed to intensify over the summer. By September, the seal is about to break.
People will return to New York, Philadelphia and whatever lives they had before. That knowledge hangs over the final third of the film. The house has been a pause in ordinary life, and pauses cannot continue indefinitely.
The house feels like a refuge until everyone realises that a refuge can also become the place where there is nowhere left to avoid one another.
The production history makes the finished film even more fascinating. Allen shot September, edited it and then decided that the movie was not working. Rather than merely replacing a few scenes, he rewrote portions and shot the film again.
Mia Farrow and Dianne Wiest remained, but several major roles changed. Maureen O’Sullivan originally played Diane before illness prevented her from returning, and Elaine Stritch ultimately took the role. Peter passed through Christopher Walken and Sam Shepard before Sam Waterston played him in the finished version. Denholm Elliott moved from Lloyd to Howard, while Jack Warden became Lloyd.
That story fits this particular film strangely well. September is already about characters imagining different versions of their lives: the person they could have loved, the city they could move to, the marriage they could leave, the book they could write. The film itself exists because Allen looked at one completed version and decided another possibility was still available.
I do not think the history automatically makes the finished picture better or worse. What interests me is the degree of commitment involved in starting again. There are very few filmmakers who would be given the opportunity to remake their own unreleased film almost immediately after completing it.
The final movement is painful because almost every possible future collapses at once. Lane discovers Peter and Stephanie together. Diane announces that she and Lloyd intend to remain in the house just as Lane is preparing to sell it. The secret surrounding the shooting finally erupts, and the possibility that the house could finance Lane’s new beginning appears to disappear.
Yet the ending does not leave her completely without a future. Diane eventually gives the house to Lane, Stephanie decides to return to her family and Peter leaves for New York. Howard accepts that Lane is unlikely to remain part of his life. The arrangements formed during summer begin dissolving.
Lane is still hurt, and Allen does not give her a sudden transformation that would feel dishonest. What she has instead is work to do. The house must be prepared for sale. She can still return to New York. She can still try to revive her photography.
I like the modesty of that ending. Recovery is not presented as a revelation. Sometimes survival means having something practical to do tomorrow morning.
September ends without giving Lane the life she wanted. It gives her something more believable: another day in which to begin again.
The title becomes increasingly appropriate as the film moves towards its close. September is not winter. Nothing has ended completely. But the season has changed enough that summer can no longer pretend it will last forever.
That is the emotional state of almost every character. Peter and Stephanie cannot continue pretending their attraction exists outside consequence. Howard cannot continue imagining that Lane may eventually respond to him. Lane cannot continue building a future around Peter. Diane cannot entirely avoid the damage left by her past.
There is a strong Chekhovian quality to all of this: intelligent people talking about the lives they want while time quietly carries those lives somewhere else. Allen keeps the tone severe but never entirely hopeless. People disappoint one another, but they also endure.
September will never be one of the most immediately accessible films in the filmography. It has almost none of the comic energy that many people naturally associate with Woody Allen, and its deliberate theatricality asks for patience.
But I think its small scale is precisely what makes it interesting. There is nowhere for the drama to hide behind spectacle, locations or elaborate plotting. Everything depends on six actors, a house, a storm, some music and the painful distance between who people love and who loves them back.
By the time summer finally gives way to September, the house looks much the same as it did at the beginning. The people inside it do not.
Cast and Characters
Mia Farrow
A vulnerable photographer trying to rebuild her life at the family cottage while hoping that her relationship with Peter may become something more.
Dianne Wiest
Lane’s married friend, spending the summer away from her husband and children and increasingly drawn towards Peter.
Sam Waterston
An advertising executive trying to become a serious writer, caught between Lane’s affection and his growing attraction to Stephanie.
Elaine Stritch
Lane’s charismatic actress mother, whose glamorous personality and complicated past dominate the family history.
Denholm Elliott
A French professor living nearby who has fallen deeply in love with Lane despite knowing that her attention is fixed elsewhere.
Jack Warden
Diane’s physicist husband, whose calm temperament provides a contrast to the emotional turbulence surrounding the younger characters.
Piano standards drifting through a summer house
September has no conventional dramatic score. Instead Allen keeps the music inside the world of the film: Stephanie plays the piano, records are heard in the house and familiar standards quietly accompany conversations about love, regret and missed possibilities.
On a Slow Boat to China
Played on piano by Bernie Leighton, Loesser’s romantic standard appears prominently within the house. Its gentle longing is ideally suited to a film where nearly everyone is imagining an intimacy that circumstances may never allow them to have.
Songs that quietly echo what the characters cannot say
Bernie Leighton performs a series of standards including What’ll I Do, Who, I’m Confessin’ (That I Love You), Moonglow and When Day Is Done.
Recordings by Ambrose and His Orchestra bring Out of Nowhere and Just One More Chance into the soundtrack.
Art Tatum and Ben Webster, with Red Callender and Bill Douglass, provide performances of My Ideal and Cole Porter’s Night and Day.
My Ideal
The title alone feels almost perfectly suited to a film filled with people imagining the person or life that might finally make them happy.
Just One More Chance
Performed by Ambrose and His Orchestra, the standard belongs naturally to the film’s atmosphere of romantic possibilities that may already have passed.
What’ll I Do
Bernie Leighton’s piano performance adds another understated note of longing to a soundtrack deliberately kept within the rooms of the house.
Night and Day
Performed by Art Tatum and Ben Webster with Red Callender and Bill Douglass, Porter’s standard adds elegance to the film’s intimate musical world.
Locations
September appears to take place in an isolated Vermont country house, but every image in the film was created inside a New York studio.
The production was filmed entirely at Kaufman Astoria Studios in Queens. Santo Loquasto designed the house as a complete dramatic environment, while Carlo Di Palma’s photography and carefully controlled sound create the illusion of late-summer countryside beyond its walls.
Vermont
The drama takes place at a country house in Vermont during the final week of August as the summer begins giving way to September.
Kaufman Astoria Studios
The entire film was shot on soundstages at Kaufman Astoria Studios rather than on location in Vermont.
The Country House
Santo Loquasto designed the house specifically for the film, creating connected rooms and long interior perspectives that allowed the camera to keep the drama visually fluid despite the single setting.
The Invisible Outdoors
Rain, insects, darkness and weather suggest an expansive country landscape even though the production never leaves the studio.
Late-Summer Light
Warm interiors and deep darkness beyond the windows make the house feel both comforting and increasingly enclosed as the relationships inside it become more difficult.
A Film Made Twice
When Allen decided the original completed version was not working, production returned to the same studio and the film was substantially rewritten and shot again.
Awards and Recognition
The Entire Film Reshot
After completing and editing the first version, Allen rewrote parts of the screenplay and returned to production to remake the film, an extraordinary decision even within his famously flexible working methods.
Several Major Roles Recast
Mia Farrow and Dianne Wiest remained throughout, while Elaine Stritch, Sam Waterston and Jack Warden ultimately joined the finished version after the production changes.
A Defining Diane Frasier
Stritch gives the film one of its most commanding performances, combining Diane’s humour, glamour and selfishness with enough humanity to prevent her becoming a simple villain.
A Chamber Drama
Almost the entire story unfolds within a single house, depending on performance, dialogue and changing emotional alliances rather than external action.
Santo Loquasto
The purpose-built house functions almost like another character, creating an apparently natural Vermont setting entirely within a Queens soundstage.
One of Allen’s Purest Dramas
Following Interiors, the film stands among Allen’s most concentrated attempts to work without the safety net of comedy, focusing instead on family history, unrequited love and emotional disappointment.