Interiors

Interiors must rank as one of the most spectacular changes of direction for an American artist since Clint Eastwood made Breezy. Working as director and writer only, Allen put together a beautifully acted, lyrically written exploration of an intelligent middle class American family whose three grown-up daughters are thunderstruck when their father trades in his elegant depressive wife for a lively, but jarringly vulgar, divorcee. The film has moments of humour, but they are integrated into a totally serious structure which isolates the family's countervailing tensions with a scalpel-like penetration. Only in a single character, the failed husband of one of the daughters, does the tone falter towards soap. Otherwise the approach is rock steady and, if the film's surface invites superficial comparisons with Bergman, its real roots lie in the very finest American art.