Retro-Romance in a Swanky Town Hannah and Her Sisters Directed and Written by Woody Allen

By RICHARD CORLISS

Manhattan--the one in the Rodgers and Hart song, the city of dreams in '30s movies, the old apogee of swank--has become a figment of Woody Allen's imagination. Thank heavens. Reclamation of the borough's tattered image could be in no better hands. In Annie Hall, Manhattan and this beguiling new comedy, the penthouses have been replaced by SoHo lofts West Side labyrinths, but the preoccupations are pretty much the same as those faced by romantic New Yorkers from Fred and Ginger to Kate and Cary. Smart people with sin-deep problems walk through a muggerless Central Park. Money worries are for comic relief. Cocktail-party chat is about something wittier than property values in Quogue. % You will find no filthy streets, colicky children or subway Rambos here. Instead, there is the invigorating lilt of spring in the air, and love and the Chrysler Building are just around every corner. No wonder New Yorkers love Woody Allen pictures: he makes retro-romances for the nostalgic urbanite.

Hannah and Her Sisters is old-fashioned in another sense: its plot has the elegant geometry of a Philip Barry play. Two triangles converge at a common point: Hannah (Mia Farrow), who has two sisters, Holly (Dianne Wiest) and Lee (Barbara Hershey), and has been married twice, first to Mickey (Woody Allen) and now to Elliot (Michael Caine). Eventually, each sister has an affair with one of Hannah's men. Elliot begins the roundelay by lurching into a mad pash for the beautiful, cheerful, lost Lee. Perhaps he is weary of Hannah's competence; she is a kind of live-in social worker for her sweet, nerdy husband. Lee, for her part, is tired of baby-sitting her European boyfriend (Max Von Sydow) and is ready to find another professorial loser to whom she can teach the facts of love. Meanwhile, Holly flounces desperately among Mr. Wrongs until she finds Mickey, a TV producer and the only person in New York who worries more than she does.

From this outline one could imagine farce or domestic tragedy. And indeed the cast of characters--three sisters, bickering parents, the satellite husbands and lovers--could be found in Allen's humorless Interiors (1978). Hannah takes its sufferers seriously but not solemnly; it massages them rather than pointing a finger. Elliot may apostrophize in soppy cliches about his infatuation ("What passion today with Lee! She was like a volcano!"), but he is canny enough to woo Lee with love poems by E.E. Cummings, the thinking man's Kahlil Gibran. Mickey's belief that he has a brain tumor may lead him on quests for ultimate answers, but to him Catholicism is all Wonder bread and moving-eye portraits of Jesus. The prospect of reincarnation is just as spooky. "Great," he sulks. "That means I'll have to sit through the Ice Capades again."

In the end, a godless universe smiles on Hannah and her extended family. For one couple, like ends up with like; another pair discovers that compromise is the best salve for a seven-year itch. It could be that, at 50, Allen is looking not to accuse his characters, or even to absolve them, but to lay on a blessing. In his Manhattan everyone has his reasons, and almost everyone deserves a happy ending. Dear, dour Mickey gets blessed best, with a wry miracle of regeneration. The barrenness of despair gives way to a hope for continuation of the species. For most American directors--glad-handers and show- boaters--that resolution might seem tentative at best. But for Woody Allen, who finds grim death gargling all around him, isn't it romantic?