Chekhovian Sketchwork SEPTEMBER

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

The trouble with most great comic figures is that they are desperate to be loved. Woody Allen has the opposite problem: people are desperate to love him, and that perturbs his essentially wary and austere nature. Every so often he makes a so-called serious film, as if to test his own integrity and perhaps that of his audience's feelings. When he does, astonishment and disappointment are his unfair rewards.

September, which Allen wrote and directed, is one of these sticky wickets. After a summer, six people prepare to take their leave of a country house owned by the quakingly vulnerable Lane (Mia Farrow). They include her mother (Elaine Stritch), a bruising emotional bully; her stepfather (Jack Warden), who is a noisy irrelevancy; a neighbor (Denholm Elliott) who expresses love by being socially obliging; a best friend (Dianne Wiest) who is obscurely tense; and Peter (Sam Waterston), the ad man who rented the guest cottage on the property and then failed in two obvious duties: he didn't finish the novel he intended to write there, and he didn't fall in love with his landlady.

The role of Peter is exceedingly well written, and Waterston reaches the heights of shiftiness at precisely those moments when he most openly proclaims his emotions. But all these people are relentlessly and statically articulate, especially when they are obscuring motives from themselves and one another. The humor of their humorlessness is often Chekhovian, and the flow of Allen's camera and cutting, together with the elegance of Cinematographer Carlo Di Palma's light, grants them a certain grace and dignity. But sometimes the members of this precious circle are too glibly elucidated; other times they are backed away from silently. In September, Allen is sketching when he means to be etching.