The framework of "Hannah and Her Sisters" rests upon three Thanksgiving dinners, set over the course of two years. It’s a novelistic structure, a dramaturgical clockwork mechanism of sorts that Woody Allen borrows more from Chekhov than from contemporary cinema. If Tolstoy, at the start of Anna Karenina, decreed that every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, Allen seems to respond by building an entire universe on this maxim, transforming an Upper West Side apartment into the stage for a chamber piece where neuroses, unconfessed desires, and existential crises move like instruments in a complex and dissonant score.

The film is a tapestry of three main stories, interwoven with the mastery of a Flemish artisan. At the center, like a sun around which restless planets orbit, is Hannah (Mia Farrow), the perfect sister, the successful actress, the devoted wife, the loving mother. Her stability is the pivot around which the emotional chaos of the others revolves, but it is a stability that, on closer inspection, reveals the cracks of passivity, of a control that is perhaps a form of denial. Her world is thrown into question by her husband Elliot (a magnificent, Oscar-winning Michael Caine), a financial consultant who masks the soul of a romantic poet and who pines for Hannah’s sister, the younger and more restless Lee (Barbara Hershey). Elliot's interior monologues, confessing his romantic torment while life flows on in apparent normalcy, are pure Joycean stream of consciousness, a drawing-room Ulysses where this particular Leopold Bloom wanders not through Dublin but through the rooms of his own marriage, searching for an escape.

The third sister, Holly (a stupendous, also Oscar-winning Dianne Wiest), is Hannah's antithesis: a concentration of insecurities, professional failures (from actress to caterer to writer), and romantic disasters. She is the most "Allen-esque" character of the trio, the one whose trajectory of falling and rising again provides the film with its most complete and, in a sense, most hopeful transformational arc. Her rivalry with Hannah is subtle and poisonous, steeped in an envy that is also a desperate plea for approval.

Running in parallel, and almost a philosophical short film in its own right, is the story of Mickey Sachs (Allen himself), Hannah's hypochondriacal ex-husband and a television producer. His is a veritable comic danse macabre. Following a medical false alarm, Mickey plummets into an abyss of existential angst. His search for meaning in a seemingly mute and indifferent universe is a masterpiece of metaphysical comedy. He attempts to convert to Catholicism, with hilarious results ("Should I buy some crucifixes, some white bread and some mayonnaise?"), he flirts with the Hare Krishnas, but no pre-packaged faith can quell his cosmic terror. His crisis is not just personal; it is the intellectual counterpoint to the purely romantic crises of the other characters. If Elliot, Lee, and Holly are wrestling with the demons of love and desire, Mickey is wrestling directly with God—or rather, with His deafening absence.

Here, Allen achieves a perfect synthesis of his two guiding spirits: Ingmar Bergman and the Marx Brothers. The presence in the cast of Max von Sydow, Bergman’s signature actor, in the role of Frederick, the elderly and misanthropic painter with whom Lee is living, is not a simple homage but a declaration of intent. Frederick is a concentrate of European nihilism, an artist who despises humanity and its mediocrity, a character straight out of a film by the Swedish master. His relationship with Lee, based on an intellectual paternalism that suffocates her, is the representation of art as an existential prison. This is the bleakest Bergman, the Bergman of The Silence or Winter Light.

But Allen's answer to this abyss is not the silence of God, but the thunderous anarchy of Groucho. Mickey's epiphany, the turning point of his journey, occurs in an arthouse cinema during a screening of the Marx Brothers' Duck Soup. While contemplating suicide, he is overcome by their demented and liberating comedy. In that moment, he understands. If the universe has no meaning, if death is certain and faith is an illusion, then the only possible answer is not despair, but an acceptance of the absurd. Perhaps the "meaning" is to enjoy the show, to laugh at the chaos, to appreciate the brief, wonderful intervals of joy that life grants us between one uncertainty and the next. It is a profoundly humanist conclusion, a kind of optimistic existentialism that finds salvation not in a transcendent dogma, but in the immanence of popular art, of entertainment, of human connection.

Allen's direction here is at its peak of elegance and fluidity. Aided by the warm and enveloping cinematography of Carlo Di Palma, he makes the camera dance within the bourgeois apartments, with long tracking shots that bind the characters in the same physical space while their minds wander elsewhere. The New York of the film is not just a backdrop but a pulsating cultural ecosystem, a world of art galleries, theaters, television studios, and restaurants where private dramas play out. The use of music, which ranges from Bach to Puccini to jazz standards, is never mere commentary, but an additional layer of meaning, an emotional counterpoint that enriches the visual narrative.

"Hannah and Her Sisters" is perhaps the work in which Allen most masterfully fuses his comic and dramatic souls, blending his neurotic stand-up persona with his identity as a cultured, tormented cinephile. It is a film that possesses the ensemble structure and psychological depth of a great nineteenth-century novel, but filtered through the neurotic sensibility and irony of late-twentieth-century New York. Every character is flawed, every relationship a compromise, every happiness fragile and fleeting. And yet, in the finale, which brings the story full circle with another Thanksgiving dinner, a glimmer of hope finds its way through. It is not the naive hope of a happy ending, but the mature awareness that, despite everything—the betrayals, the fears, the absence of definitive answers—the simple fact of being here, together, sharing a meal, a laugh, or an old song, is perhaps the only miracle we can count on. A masterpiece of rare intelligence and moving humanity.