Hannah and Her Sisters (1986, Woody Allen)

Reading the script for Hannah and Her Sisters, I can see that Woody Allen has more of a plan when's he's making his movies (or at least this one) than I expected. I heard stories of him not asking for another take on Bullets Over Broadway because a Knicks game was starting soon and he wanted to go watch it. There's something about Woody Allen where it seems like he's born to make movies but maybe he doesn't really like them.

Anyway, in the script, there's all kinds of detailed detritus that tell you what he's thinking. For instance, characters will sometimes have dialogue that is indicated as off-screen, implying where the camera is pointing and where the character is in relation to the frame. It doesn't help the story or add to the scene, it just shows you how he's going to block the scene. A strange addition, but I suppose that's not unusual for a director writing his own script.

The structure of the whole movie is very interesting. It covers somewhere around a year of time and it follows what seems like many handfuls of characters. But the main characters may be Michael Caine and Woody Allen. Surrounding them are Hannah, played by Mia Farrow, and her sisters played by Diane Wiest and Barbara Hershey. Then there's Hershey's boyfriend, played by Max Von Sydow. And there's Hannah's parents, which appear two or three times, and Woody's, which appearance at least once. But now I'm just listing secondary characters.

The point is that this story is more like a tableau; an episodic film that just feels like it follows people. Big changes do happen - Michael Caine and Barbara Hershey begin and then later break off an affair, and Woody Allen falls in love with Diane Wiest - but it really just feels like another year. Which I don't count as a bad thing. Sometimes I very much enjoy a film that doesn't focus on a plot, one that's barreling ahead toward some very specific conclusion.

Films like Hannah and Her Sisters simply feel more like life. It feels like something familiar, like something I experience every day. I love movies like Seven, for instance, where you're following two characters trying to accomplish one specific objective. But movies like Hannah and Her Sisters, or Manhattan, or Annie Hall just remind you about life and make you think about very simple things, like thinking about meaning and purpose in life, about love, about a career, about whatever it is that's important in your world. While a movie like Seven may be important in terms of story, in terms of the world having one more story on its shelf for all to read, a movie like Hannah and Her Sisters offers more for a person as an individual in terms of what they can learn about themselves and for that reason I find movies like these of great importance.