DVD Afternoon in Canada

This Saturday's presentation was Hannah and Her Sisters, Woody Allen's 1986 film. Those who have called it his best are not far off. Though not as trailblazing as Annie Hall or as genuinely beautiful and stirring as Manhattan, Hannah delivers where it counts: the writing is quick, witty and interesting; the story is captivating, but not loaded with the improbability that has plagued much of Allen's recent work; and the acting is brilliant.

In recent years, Allen's films have followed one of two formulas (with the exception of the charming mockumentary, Sweet and Lowdown, and the odd Celebrity): zany comedy based on a silly premise (Hollywood Ending, Curse of the Jade Scorpion, Small Time Crooks) and the ongoing saga of love in Manhattan (the tour de force that is Deconstructing Harry, Anything Else), with some overlap (Melinda and Melinda, the musical Everyone Says I Love You). Leaving aside the former (even Woody Allen should be told no once in a while, though Hollywood Ending was more charming than cockamamie), Allen's take on romance in New York has grown cynical and jaded to the point where his characters are almost farces. Deconstructing's Harry Block, though a delightful novelist, is hard to stomach after 80 minutes, and that seems to be the point.

The heroic Woody Allen character of the 1970s, though physically inadequate and always a nebbish nudnik, was still that: a hero. Twenty years later, he's a pill-popping, down-on-his-luck, multiply-divorced failure (Harry, with his writer's block - not a clever double entendre - hits closest to home). Alvy Singer, of Annie Hall, and Isaac Davis, of Manhattan, were whimsical at their core - never far from the eager Jewish hustler that Mordecai Richler has so well portrayed in his Montreal novels. Annoying and pushy though they might have been, they were defined by being lovable. The late-Allen shmucks are the epitome of unlove.

So what does this have to do with Hannah and Her Sisters? Paul Simon's painfully personal song "Hearts and Bones," which preceded Hannah by a few years, sketches "the arc of a love affair," and so does Hannah. If Simon instructs that, once entwined, hearts and bones "won't come undone," Allen offers a those unlucky in love a second chance. In the end, the hypochondriac ne'er-do-well divorcé and the always-broke, can't get into adulthood, casual cokehead (it was the mid-80s) find pleasantness - and domesticity - together. The final scene, a touching shot of Allen and deserving Oscar-winner Dianne Weist in front of a mirror, is Woody's nicest touch. The arc becomes a circle, and, as Simon would put it in "Thelma," an ode to unexpected love in middle age, "everything else becomes nothing at all."