September

Released 1987
Stars Denholm Elliott, Dianne Wiest, Mia Farrow, Elaine Stritch, Sam Waterston, Jack Warden
Directed by Woody Allen

There are six major characters in the movie, each and every one of them hungry to be loved and taken care of. And everyone in the movie loves somebody - but usually not the person who loves them. The entire weekend comes down to a series of little emotional tangos, in which each character moves restlessly from room to room, trying to arrange to be alone with the object of their love - and away from the person obsessed with them.

What is Allen up to here? The structure of his story is all too neat to make a messy, psychologically complicated modern movie. In the neat pairings of couples and non-couples, Allen almost seems to be making a modern-dress Elizabethan comedy. And that may be his point. When we fall in love, we are always so wound up in the absolute uniqueness of ourselves and our loved one, in the feeling that nothing like this has ever happened before, that we cannot see how the same old patterns repeat themselves. To turn toward one person, we must turn away from another. If the person we turn to is not interested, we are left stranded, which is the way all but the luckiest of us probably feel most of the time.

Summary by Roger Ebert

This movie feels and looks like a play. You can feel it in the dialogue and the stage entrances and exits. It's claustrophobic in its single setting as each character jockeys to woo his or her target of affection, but this is a movie mostly about unrequited love. It's about the sad month of September when summer loves come to an end, and it's time to return to reality. This story is unusual in that the subjects are middle-aged when summer loves are rare, but each character has a reason for being able to spend the summer in a cottage on the lake. The emotions are held in check as the characters mostly intellectualize about love, and everyone is so blinded by their desire that it's almost preordained that everyone will be left unhappy. When you're middle-aged, you don't have the luxury of rejecting every person who loves you so you can chase someone who doesn't, but that's what these characters do. Personally, I found that tedious at times, so I have to give it a mild recommendation. --Bill Alward, November 9, 2002