It has long been common knowledge that Woody Allen’s 1992 feature “Husbands and Wives” (which I discuss in this clip) reflected the state of tension with his longtime companion Mia Farrow as he was beginning a romantic relationship with her adoptive daughter, Soon-Yi Previn. (Jess Cagle wrote about the movie’s production in Entertainment Weekly at the time, soon after the magazine published an unsigned report on the subject.) The movie is Allen’s most furiously emotional work, both in its substance and its style. But what’s surprising is its long-span connection to Allen’s most recent film, “Midnight in Paris”: in this new work, Allen displays his fascination with the American expats of the Jazz Age, and brings to life, in the movie’s flashback sequences, a somewhat halcyon version of the Parisian literary scene immortalized in Ernest Hemingway’s “A Moveable Feast” and Gertrude Stein’s “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.” Though “Husbands and Wives” is set in contemporary New York, one of its key plot elements—the loss, by the young woman played by Juliette Lewis, of the only existing typescript of a novel by Allen’s character, Gabe Roth—is derived from an episode from that autobiographical work of Hemingway’s, concerning his first wife, Hadley; it’s in the chapter called “Hunger Was Good Discipline”; here, the writer speaks of his story “My Old Man”:
About the time that followed, Hemingway wrote, “It was a bad time and I did not think I could write any more then….” In “Husbands and Wives,” Allen takes the theme and makes it his own: things work out differently, a little more simply in some ways, but with some particular difficulties that are, artistically, among Allen’s own lifelong subjects.