The Frame

In case anyone doubted Woody Allen’s admiration for Ingmar Bergman, he made this film to prove it (I suppose his use of Smiles of a Summer Night as basis for A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy also counts). Interiors is about the best imitation of a Bergman chamber drama you could ask for, down to the spare set design, strained family relations, and a climax involving an angry sea. Still, it is also very much Allen’s film–his first straight drama–focusing on deeply neurotic, introspective characters unable to get outside their own heads for long enough to form really true relationships. The mother in the film tries to control her interior life and that of her family in the same way that she controls her living spaces as an interior designer, from whence comes the title. Allen is a bit more didactic in the explanation of that theme than Bergman would have been, but hey. That’s why it’s an Allen film rather than a Bergman one, right?
Well Above Average