What was the title of this 1991 film, set in California, which starred Woody Allen and Bette Midler?

The 1991 film featuring Woody Allen and Bette Midler, set primarily within a California shopping center, is titled "Scenes From a Mall." This comedic drama follows a seemingly happily married couple, Deborah (Midler), a successful psychotherapist and author, and Nick (Allen), a high-powered sports lawyer, on their 16th wedding anniversary. What begins as a celebratory shopping trip in a Beverly Hills mall quickly unravels as both characters confess to affairs, leading to escalating arguments and emotional confrontations that lay bare the complexities and dysfunctions of their long-standing relationship.

The movie's title itself is a clever nod to Ingmar Bergman's acclaimed 1973 Swedish miniseries "Scenes from a Marriage," which similarly explored the disintegration of a marital bond. "Scenes From a Mall" stood out as a unique project for Woody Allen, marking one of the rare instances where he starred in a film he did not also write or direct. The pairing of Allen's neurotic charm with Midler's flamboyant energy offered an interesting dynamic, though critics at the time had mixed reactions to the film.

Despite the film being set in a sprawling California mall, and exterior shots being filmed at the Beverly Center in Los Angeles, much of the interior mall footage was actually captured on sound stages in Queens, New York, and at the Stamford Town Center in Connecticut. An amusing piece of trivia reveals that Woody Allen, known for his New York-centric films, reportedly had never even set foot in a shopping mall before taking on this role. The film offers a concentrated look at a marriage in crisis, using the consumerist backdrop of a mall as a stage for intimate and often uncomfortable revelations.