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Life is a train ride, says Woody Allen, he's trapped with Diane Arbus rejects in one railcar while Sharon Stone beckons him from another, the garbage dump is everybody's final stop. "I thought this was supposed to be a comedy. That was the most horrifying thing I've ever seen!" The jester-auteur is bitten by the existential bug, too much suffering in the world for funny business (cf. Sturges' Sullivan's Travels), a retrospective at the Stardust Hotel helps sort things out, or not. The eternal whirl of scholars and groupies and autograph-seekers and aspiring thespians, through a fish-eye lens dimly. "A born magician" and his remembrances, musings on the inherent anger of the trade ("it's hidden behind the jokes"). Actresses, the dark British neurotic (Charlotte Rampling) and the fair Gallic lass (Marie-Christine Barrault), plus a New York Philharmonic violinist (Jessica Harper). Allen takes stock, "the full complement of nasties." (The format builds on Annie Hall, and is revisited in Deconstructing Harry.) The ether of consciousness, fluid and sour, it's a blowup of Groucho one moment and the next a blowup of Nguyen Van Lém executed. The nerd's hostility unleashed, "it broke loose while he napped" to roam the landscape and maul family and lawyers. The condition is a cosmic one, the psychiatrist gives it a name ("Ozymandias Melancholia"), Allen summons Altman's Nashville to end it. "To you, I'm an atheist. To God, I'm the loyal opposition." The constellation inevitably fades but until then there's a spring breeze and a contented glance and Louis Armstrong's genuine Jazz Heaven. The obsessive inquiry boiled down to a throwaway science-fiction image is borrowed by Antonioni in Identificazione di una donna. Cinematography by Gordon Willis. With Tony Roberts, Daniel Stern, Amy Wright, Anne De Salvo, Helen Hanft, John Rothman, David Lipman, and Leonardo Cimino. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |