Alice
She is pure. Pure in heart. Pure in thinking. Just go in. Her strict Catholic upbringing may only partly explain this. Alice (Mia Farrow) cleaned herself - in good faith, so to speak. And after 16 years of marriage to Doug Tate (William Hurt), Alice's purity has blossomed. Doug is rich. Alice is a housewife and mother of two children. She goes shopping, she goes for manicures and pedicures, she trains her body with a dedicated trainer. The body should be as pure as the soul. And their children should be like this, pure. She has small talk with her friends who can hardly be called such. Alice is one of those women in Manhattan who has come a long way - to become a rich wife and mother, the better housekeeper of a better man. And Alice has a backache. Their marriage has broken in as it could not be more broken in. And Alice has a headache. Her husband Doug is one of those rich, arrogant assholes who thinks a lot, yes everything, but about whom other people who are not part of his “circles” prefer to give a wide berth and think: “I want to get into them ... ”
Once again, Woody Allen tells the story of a woman who has locked herself in a kind of emotional prison, who thinks she is happy, but who, like the Chinese acupuncturist and herbalist Dr. Yang (Keye Luke) will tell her later, believes in an idea of what happiness is but is not happy.
Her pain drives her to Dr. Yang, an older man in Chinatown who she thinks will prescribe something for her and then her pain will be gone. Not even close. Yang hypnotizes Alice, who doesn't seem to fit in Chinatown at all, dressed in a nice costume, wrapped in one of those conventional coats, a woman who actually only fits in Manhattan. Yang places her in front of a spinning disc with spiral black lines and hypnotizes her - against her inner reluctance. And Alice fantasizes: She sees Doug in Dr. Yang and tells him that she no longer wants to be just a housewife and mother. She tells of a man who sends his child to the same school as she and with whom she fell in love. No, of course she did not fall in love, because that is not appropriate for a woman who has been married for 16 years. Yang prescribes herbs for a tea - and now Alice experiences her first miracle. When she meets Joe (Joe Mantegna) again, with whom she fell in love, it just gushes out of her. Alice flirts so hard with Joe that he is completely speechless. “Your eyes are really full of fire,” she tells him. And her "friend" Nina (Robin Bartlett) advises her, who is ashamed of her behavior, to do it like all women in her milieu: to get one or more lovers.
But that's not Alice. Alice - she had given up everything when she first met Doug, everything, actually herself, her dreams, her interests, her career plans. And she didn't listen to her sister Dorothy (Blythe Danner), who became a lawyer and criticized Alice's lifestyle from the start.
It's wonderful and unique how Mia Farrow plays that wallflower that Alice is slowly becoming, this grown child who is no more than a housekeeper and nanny for Doug, who has been sleeping with other women for years for social occasions, this adult who is locked in the innocence of a child and has developed corresponding fine defense mechanisms so as not to develop any emotions.
And yet there is something else in Alice, something repressed that wants to surface, something that pushes, is impatient, wants to explode, goes into the back and head and makes her feel physical pain because her soul is suffering, that is one thing a creeping, but hardly suppressable spirit of resistance kindled against Doug's reluctance to let his wife work or do an education.
It is also wonderful how Allen spoke about the figure of Dr. Yang reveals the secrets in Alice by incorporating fiction into the film. Alice is allowed to do six miracles over the herbs of Dr. Experience Yang. And these six miracles will help her break free from prison. She is allowed to observe how invisible through one of these herbs Joe is still attached to his ex-wife Vicki (Judy Davis); she meets her childhood friend Ed (Alec Baldwin), who has long been dead, again as a ghost who advises her to clarify her relationship with Joe and that with Doug; she smokes at Dr. Yang opium and fantasizes her youth; other herbs sharpen their senses as to the area in which they could develop their creativity.
All of this is staged with an indescribable sympathy for Alice, a critical one