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Posted on 09 September 2012
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| CULTURE & SOCIETY |
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FILM REVIEW |
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Woody’s Roman Holiday
By Shougat Dasgupta
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To Rome With Love
DIRECTOR
Woody Allen
STARRING
Jesse Eisenberg, Ellen Page, Woody Allen, Judy Davis, Alec Baldwin, Penelope Cruz, Roberto Benigni et al
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For the last several years Woody Allen has taken his show on the road, filming great European cities (London, Barcelona, Paris and now Rome) with affection, a tourist’s reverence for their famous landmarks but with little interest in the cities themselves, in their people, in their unfamiliar districts, in their particular cultures. Allen is still preoccupied, still consumed with making and remaking nebbish epics — movies in which whiny, nerdy, not particularly likeable guys first get and then inevitably lose the mercurial women of their fantasies. Away from that corner of Manhattan that is forever Allen’s, its restaurants, cafes, galleries and expensive shops, he still wants to make Manhattan movies.
Let me rephrase that: Allen doesn’t make ‘Manhattan movies’ (the magnificent Manhattan, with its celebratory opening sequence set to Gershwin’s ‘Rhapsody in Blue’, notwithstanding), as in it’s not life as it is lived in Manhattan that interests him so much as his own conception, or rather pastiche, of smart metropolitan life. This is why there’s no appreciable difference in the themes that concern Allen in movies set in Manhattan or Paris, London or Barcelona. Indeed, we enjoy Allen, if we enjoy Allen at all, precisely because of that singular style, that singular conception of urban life. In To Rome With Love, his character, a former impresario and opera director, warns his psychoanalyst wife against psychoanalysing him but it’s hard to resist. Allen’s romanticising of cities, of smart talk by smart people in smart restaurants, must owe something to his Flatbush upbringing — not quite a country cousin but with his face pressed up to the world’s most dazzling urban agglomeration.
To call Allen a chronicler of New York life would be like calling PG Wodehouse a chronicler of upper class English life. My paperback copies of Wodehouse’s novels and stories always carried a quote from Evelyn Waugh. “Mr. Wodehouse’s idyllic world”, Waugh wrote, “can never stale… He has made a world for us to live in and delight in.” Allen’s world, rife with human weakness and folly, cannot be described as “idyllic” but for his fans its familiarity is a comfort. As another Allen alter-ego, played either by himself or an actor falling helplessly into Allen’s tics and rhythms, sinks into another psychoanalyst’s couch, we let out a contented little sigh. God's in his heaven and all's right with the world.
To Rome With Love, Allen’s latest, is a bagatelle, like Midnight In Paris, and only a little less delightful. It begins, as did its predecessor, with lavish, richly filmed local clichés. We are introduced to Rome through one of its flamboyant, white-gloved traffic policemen and following the inevitable reference to Roman driving (somewhat tame by Delhi standards) are equally inevitable references to the Trevi Fountain and the Spanish Steps. Allen is nothing if not literal. How else would you know you were in Rome, if a character didn’t refer to the city as ‘eternal’; if there weren’t scenes set in the Colosseum; if awed Americans didn’t marvel at buildings, or at least remnants of buildings, surviving for thousands of years? Allen does this in all his cities, the famous landmarks impassive observers of the characters’ foibles, their foolish, self-destructive games.
The film tells four genial stories of transformative events. In each unrelated story an Allenesque nebbish has his life changed whether by a world class talent, by an overnight metamorphosis into Italy’s most famous man, by an inevitably doomed affair with a flaky, damaged beauty, or by a farcical encounter with a prostitute. Each strand is equal parts inspired looniness and Allen at his most slapdash: for instance, a performance of Pagliacci at La Scala with the leading tenor soaping and scrubbing himself is as delirious as the Groucho Marx-costumed chorus line in Allen’s musical Everyone Says I Love You; on the other hand, can a reasonably travelled man, even an American unfamiliar with languages other than English, really not tell the difference between the English ‘imbecile’ and the Italian ‘imbecille’? Many of the performances are enjoyable. I particularly liked Judy Davis, in brilliant, waspish form, and Penelope Cruz’s feisty prostitute and her Spanish-accented Italian.
Allen, consensus has it, is having a late-career renaissance; his movies are as box office as they’ve ever been and there has even been the odd critical success, Match Point, for instance, and certainly Midnight in Paris. Both Midnight in Paris and To Rome With Love are easy to watch but my favourite Woody Allen films (and I have many) are touched with sourness, with Allen’s mostly undisguised misanthropy. Davis’s performance is a welcome relief from the sweetness — a reminder of such movies as Husbands and Wives and the underrated, wonderfully foul-mouthed Deconstructing Harry. In his best films, Allen is a sharp satirizer of the pretensions of urban sophisticates. Joan Didion, writing about such beloved Allen films as Manhattan and Annie Hall, pointed out that the characters’ “concerns and conversations are those of clever children, ‘class brains,’ acting out a yearbook fantasy of adult life.” She is right, except I think that Allen knows this as well as she does, is clear-eyed about and poking fun at his characters sophisticated knowingness.
Midnight in Paris and the inferior, if still enjoyable, To Rome With Love are nowhere near as good as Allen’s best films, entirely lacking the spikiness of those films. But they’ll do, a welcome reminder that he’s still making a film a year, still working, still staving off boredom, depression and creative death.
Shougat Dasgupta is an Assistant Editor with Tehelka.
shougat@tehelka.com
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