Stephen Farber
“…. The satiric edge of his comedies is implicit in the complex, hard-edged portraiture of a group of gifted, maddening, self-indulgent people.
“To take just one example, the family matriarch, Eve (Geraldine Page), is a high-strung aesthete who's ordered her family's lives for as long as they can remember. Her reverence for art takes the form of fanatical attention to details of interior decoration…. It's impossible not to laugh at her compulsive attention to detail, and in his earlier films, Allen would have mocked her more ruthlessly. This time he cuts deeper; he sympathetically points out the disorientation she feels when her husband leaves her and her orderly life begins to crumble. The portrait of Eve is a masterful balancing act, a blend of irony and compassion. Geraldine Page's searing performance keeps us in a tense, ambivalent relationship with the character throughout the movie.
“One startling moment epitomizes the tone of the film. When Eve attempts to commit suicide by turning on the gas oven, she first seals all the windows in her apartment with black masking tape. Unfortunately, the tape runs out just before she completes her grisly task, and she has to finish the job with a tiny roll of white adhesive tape. The scene itself recalls Liv Ullmann's suicide attempt in Face to Face, but the subtle, subversive, macabre joke about the white adhesive tape is a touch that Bergman never would have dreamed of including….”
Stephen Farber
New West, September 11, 1978
“To take just one example, the family matriarch, Eve (Geraldine Page), is a high-strung aesthete who's ordered her family's lives for as long as they can remember. Her reverence for art takes the form of fanatical attention to details of interior decoration…. It's impossible not to laugh at her compulsive attention to detail, and in his earlier films, Allen would have mocked her more ruthlessly. This time he cuts deeper; he sympathetically points out the disorientation she feels when her husband leaves her and her orderly life begins to crumble. The portrait of Eve is a masterful balancing act, a blend of irony and compassion. Geraldine Page's searing performance keeps us in a tense, ambivalent relationship with the character throughout the movie.
“One startling moment epitomizes the tone of the film. When Eve attempts to commit suicide by turning on the gas oven, she first seals all the windows in her apartment with black masking tape. Unfortunately, the tape runs out just before she completes her grisly task, and she has to finish the job with a tiny roll of white adhesive tape. The scene itself recalls Liv Ullmann's suicide attempt in Face to Face, but the subtle, subversive, macabre joke about the white adhesive tape is a touch that Bergman never would have dreamed of including….”
Stephen Farber
New West, September 11, 1978
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