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"Let me... try and make it more profound." Murnau's Sunrise for the city symphony, nothing less for Woody Allen high on Gershwin and transcendence. Winner of the August Strindberg Award, author of The Castrating Zionist, TV show hack in and out of relationships, everybody's story. The bohemian haven is a table at Elaine's, shared with the philandering pal (Michael Murphy) and the teenage squeeze (Mariel Hemingway). "I'm dating a girl wherein I can beat up her father." Opposite the preternaturally wise high-schooler is the journalistic philistine (Diane Keaton) who appreciates "a marvelous kind of negative capability" in art—her rendezvous with the protagonist occasions a sustained reverse tracking shot out of the taxicab and down the sidewalk against a galaxy of lights at night. Completing the quadrille is the ex-wife (Meryl Streep) driven to lesbianism and an impending roman à clef. "This is shaping up like a Noël Coward play. Somebody should go make martinis." Romance and evanescence and the armature of intellectualism, the supreme summation of Allen's passions and terrors. His co-auteur is Gordon Willis, whose lustrous widescreen lighting turns every locale into a shrine: A sudden thunderstorm in Central Park, the nocturnal skyline viewed from a horse carriage, the glittering counters of Bloomingdale's, dawn under the Queensboro Bridge. (The cosmic side springs to the fore in the planetarium trip, the wandering couple as slivers before the stars. "I had a mad impulse to throw you down on the lunar surface and commit interstellar perversion with you.") Nabokov plus Groucho, moral debates next to hominid skeletons, a double-bill of Inagaki and Dovzhenko. Amid all the transient emotions, the eternal trial of a new apartment. "I got rats with bongos and a frog, and I got brown water here." The Chaplinisms of the finale can't quite conceal the bittersweetness of a dissipating enchantment captured in the amber of cinema. With Anne Byrne, Karen Ludwig, Michael O'Donoghue, Tisa Farrow, and Wallace Shawn. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |