"I am two with Nature," Allen wrote early in his career. In fact, looking out from his apartment over Central Park is about as much Nature as he can stand.

"Woody has no tolerance for the country," Farrow says. "Within half an hour after arriving he's walked around the lake and is ready to go home. He gets very bored. He swears he once got a tick standing by the front door. He was the only one to get one. I didn't actually see the offending tick. He discovered it after he went back to New York. I assume he's correct although he doesn't know much about bugs. He's been seen in a beekeeper's hat at my place when it's gnats time. He'll put it on and seriously stroll by the lake in it. Of course, he never goes in the lake. He wouldn't touch the lake. 'There are live things in there,' he says." Allen's avoidance of rural water extended to a scene in "A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy" in which he and Farrow fall in a lake (actually their doubles do). Rather than soak himself with the stuff for the shot of the two of them coming out of the lake, he had himself doused with bottles of Evian water.

Allen and Farrow very much lead their own lives, while continuing a relationship that is the longest either has had. By any standard, it is not a conventional union. They are not married, neither do they live together; their apartments face each other across Central Park. When they began to date, they would wave towels out the window as they spoke on the phone, delighting in saying they could see the other. Her apartment -- which in addition to nine children and a nanny is home to two cats, a canary, a parakeet, several chinchillas and assorted tropical fish -- was used for her scenes in "Hannah and Her Sisters," which Allen directed in 1986.

"It's sort of like just enough," Allen explains one day in his Fifth Avenue apartment, a duplex penthouse with country furniture and a wraparound view of Manhattan and all of Central Park. "Perhaps if we were to live together or if we met at a different time in our lives it wouldn't work. But it seems to be just right. I have all the free time I want and it's quiet over here, and yet I get plenty of action over there. I think it's because we don't live together and that she has her own life completely and that I have mine that we're able to maintain this relationship with a certain proper tension. If we got married years ago and lived together, maybe now we'd be screaming, 'What have we gotten into?' These things are so exquisitely tuned. It's just luck."

Few married couples seem more married. They are constantly in touch with each other, and not many fathers spend as much time with their children as Allen does. He is there before they wake up in the morning, he sees them during the day and he helps put them to bed at night. As each has been married and divorced twice, experience has taught them that legalizing a relationship doesn't necessarily make it last, and Mia Farrow is fond of quoting a joke about the much-married Alan Jay Lerner: "Marriage is Alan's way of saying good-bye."

They both also seem to have what they want. Farrow is a full-time mother and has a satisfying career. Allen -- who, according to friends, spent considerable energy in his earlier marriages and relationships educating his partner and being needful of her attention -- has, in Mia Farrow, found a balance with a wholly contained woman.

In many ways, his latest movie, "Alice," is a paean to her. In it, Alice Tait (Mia Farrow), a faithful Catholic in her youth who has been married for years to a wealthy New Yorker, finds out through the medium of various magical herbs that an acupuncturist prescribes for her that she could behave in wholly un-Alice ways -- conjure up an old lover, have an affair with another man, aspire to be a writer. She also discovers that her husband has long been unfaithful to her and that her life, crammed as it is with the extravagances of the idle rich of Manhattan, is silly and empty. Even though the effect of another of the herbs makes any man who sees her fall in love with her, she realizes she wants nothing to do with any of them. Instead, reminded of her faith as a child and of the desire she had then to serve others, she abandons her life of ostentatious luxury and comfort. What Alice becomes is not unlike what Mia Farrow is. WOODY ALLEN MAKES AN average of a movie a year, and for him film making is an exhausting, depressing process. Little things drive him crazy. During the filming of "Alice," Mia Farrow took a walk in the park, and her red coat came open, revealing the white dress beneath. That ruined the esthetics for him. He reshot the scene again and again, until he knew he had what he wanted. But if at the end of the day he knows a shot is less than what he was trying to do, he doesn't sleep well. "All this obsession," he says, "it isn't perfectionism -- it's obsession, compulsion -- and all of that is no guarantee that the film is going to be any better."