Another Woman is the 17th film written and directed by Woody Allen. Gena Rowlands stars as Marion, an accomplished philosophy professor who at age 50 is compelled by a strange occurrence to take stock of her life. While working on a new book in a rented room, she is distracted by a therapist and a depressed woman (Mia Farrow) whose conversation carries through the wall. The patient's anguished commentary on her feelings of emptiness, confusion, and depression bursts through Marion's narcissistic mask of outward calm and confidence. Through a series of dreams, memories, and fantasies, she confronts her inability to express emotion, risk intimacy, or empathize with others.
Gena Rowlands gives a tour de force performance as the cerebral Marion. A cast of top-notch actors and actresses provide admirable character portraits in this engrossing psychodrama. They include Ian Holm as her philandering husband, Martha Plimpton as her stepdaughter, John Houseman as her widowed father, Harris Yulin as her estranged brother, Gene Hackman as an old flame she refused to marry, Sandy Dennis as a resentful old friend, Blythe Danner as an unfaithful acquaintance, and Philip Bosco as her first husband, a philosophy professor.
Although all life's transitions are by definition rocky, age 50 seems to have earned a particularly glaring reputation. Woody Allen's Another Woman celebrates the honesty and courage needed by men and women at this stage of life to face up to the truth of things and then to change.