And Now the Movie . . .

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Part of the great black swirl of gossip now encircling Woody Allen is the confident assertion that in his new movie, Husbands and Wives, Allen plays a college professor who makes love with a young woman student a third his age. And, oh, in Manhattan didn't he and Mariel Hemingway play a similarly mismatched couple? In Hannah and Her Sisters didn't he imagine an affair between a sister and one of her brothers-in-law? No one recalls that Manhattan's middle-aged male ended up miserably alone, and that the scandalous tryst in Hannah was not joyous or lasting. So the inference holds: that Allen's bad life is imitating his good art.

But what Husbands and Wives really imitates is some of Allen's best work. A professor (Allen) is indeed attracted to one of his students (Juliette Lewis). But she is seen as a girl with a dangerous itch for older men, and though the teacher knows temptation, he faces it down.

Anyway, this is not the film's central concern. Allen, his wife (Mia Farrow) and another couple are trying to live with the dulling compromises of long liaisons, yet also searching for sustaining warmth as the chill of the years settles on them. Trial separations, silly affairs, are the results, not the causes of their anguish.

Perhaps by Sept. 23, the occasional uncomfortable parallels will have faded. And audiences will see that the film's deepest resonances are with Allen's most popular previous works: comedies of urban manners shadowed by his rueful recognition of those abiding sexual confusions that he has always observed with a unique blend of irony and compassion.