Plot
The film is about two couples: Jack (Pollack) and Sally (Davis), and Gabe (Allen) and Judy (Farrow). The film starts when Jack and Sally arrive at Gabe and Judy's apartment and announce their separation. Gabe is shocked, but Judy takes the news personally and is very hurt. Still confused, they go out for dinner at a Chinese restaurant.
A few weeks later Sally goes to the apartment of a colleague. They plan to go out together to the opera and then to dinner. Sally asks if she can use his phone, and calls Jack. Learning from him that he has met someone, she accuses him of having had an affair during their marriage.
Judy and Gabe are introduced to Jack's new girlfriend, Sam, an aerobics trainer. While Judy and Sam shop, Gabe calls Jack's new girlfriend a "cocktail waitress" and tells him that he is crazy for leaving Sally for her. About a week later, Judy introduces Sally to Michael (Neeson), Judy's magazine colleague. Michael asks Sally out.
Meanwhile, Gabe has developed a friendship with a student of his, Rain, and has her read the manuscript for his working novel. She comments on its brilliance, though has several criticisms, to which Gabe reacts defensively due to its autobiographical nature.
Less than two weeks later, Jack and Sally are back together and the couple meet Judy and Gabe for dinner like old times. After dinner, Judy and Gabe get into an argument about her not sharing her poetry with him, then argue about many things. After Gabe makes a failed pass at her, Judy tells him that she thinks the relationship was over; a week later Gabe moves out. Judy begins seeing Michael.
Michael tells Judy he needs time alone, then says he can't help still having feelings for Sally. Judy becomes frustrated with Michael and walks out into the rain. Highlighting her "passive aggressiveness," Michael follows and begs her to stay with him. A year and a half later they marry.
At the end, the audience sees a pensive Jack and Sally back together. Jack and Sally admit their marital problems still exist (her frigidity is not solved), but they find they accept their problems as simply the price they have to pay to remain together.
Gabe is living alone because he says he's out of the race and doesn't want to hurt anyone. He said that he realized how much how he messed up with his relationship with Judy. The film ends with an immediate cut to black after Gabe pleads with the unseen documentary crew, "Can I go? Is this over?"
Read more about this topic: Husbands And Wives
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“Ends in themselves, my letters plot no change;
They carry nothing dutiable; they won’t
Aspire, astound, establish or estrange.”
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“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)