Interiors

Following the playful and enormously successful Annie Hall, Woody Allen’s next film was his first foray into full-fledged drama, combining the psychological severity of Ingmar Bergman with the disillusionment and despair of Eugene O’Neill. Interiors excavates a moment of crisis in the lives of three grown daughters—a successful poet (Diane Keaton), a self-involved TV actress (Kristin Griffith), and a frustrated would-be artist (Mary Beth Hurt)—after their parents’ long-struggling marriage ends abruptly in a quasi-unexpected divorce. Reflecting drolly on the carefully wrought dramatic personae of the three sisters, Pauline Kael wrote: “Diane Keaton does something very courageous for a rising star. She appears here with the dead-looking hair of someone who’s too distracted to do anything with it but get a permanent, and her skin looks dry and pasty. There’s discontent right in the flesh… This physical transformation is the key to Keaton’s thoughtful performance: she plays an unlikable woman—a woman who dodges issues whenever she can, who may become almost as remote as her mother.