Sleepwalking Into a Mess

TITLE: HUSBANDS AND WIVES

WRITER AND DIRECTOR: WOODY ALLEN

& THE BOTTOM LINE: What is this thing called love? A man who knows has made a film better than real life -- his, anyway.

You expect to read a cool appraisal of Woody Allen's new film. The tawdry gossip attending Husbands and Wives -- the question of whether it contains clues to Allen's dumping Mia Farrow in favor of her 21-year-old adopted daughter, Soon-Yi Previn Farrow -- this is irrelevant, surely, to the noble trade of movie criticism. You want us to ponder weightier issues, like the piquant mise-en-scene in the oeuvre of a major auteur. Perhaps the entire review should be in French.

Well, forget it. Dish comes first. Besides, there's no way that any reasonably tuned-in moviegoer can dismiss the subversive import of the dialogue between Allen, as an author who teaches a college writing course, and Farrow, as his wife, a magazine editor. She asks, "Are you ever attracted to other women?" He replies that his students "don't want an old man." He, who thinks his marriage might be saved by having children, admits, "I'm begging to have a baby that I don't even want." And when he falls for a wily coed (Juliette Lewis), he frets, "I feel myself becoming infatuated with a 20- year-old . . . I'm sleepwalking into a mess." At these moments the masks of fiction drop and seem to reveal two naked, anguished souls: the "real" Woody and Mia of late notoriety.

The thing to realize now is that Allen wrote this movie long before he says he was involved with Soon-Yi. The thing that moviegoers will realize decades hence is that Husbands and Wives is a damn fine film. Here again he is X- raying the gnarled psyches of Manhattan's glamourati: Gabe and Judy and their best friends Jack (Sydney Pollack) and Sally (Judy Davis). Each is in some stage of a mid-love crisis; each married partner is given the chance to follow a flirtation to climax or catastrophe. Typically, Allen deals himself the highest cards. Gabe alone can resist temptation and take himself "out of the race. I don't want to hurt anybody or be hurt."

The only ones sure to be hurt are those viewers who can't get used to the nosy, nausea-invoking camera style in the movie's fake documentary format. Take some Dramamine, folks. Then savor the desperate wit and the sharp acting -- especially that of Davis, who executes high comedy with the world's tensest mouth, and Farrow, doggedly searching for an Adam in a new Eden.

So this is also a movie. But it is not only a movie. It has become the accidental equivalent of a trashy best seller that expects you to know who's who even if it can't name names. TriStar Pictures knows this; it is opening the film a week early and at 800 theaters instead of the handful typical for an Allen release. The media tattlers who have already revealed the movie's reel-vs.-real twists know it. Soon so will the 'plex patrons; they will make this Allen's first hit since the 1986 Hannah and Her Sisters. Everyone seems to know it but Woody Allen.