interiors (w&d allen)

Interiors, a family drama which has s tragic conclusion strangely reminiscent of Roma, is the film that reveals the filmmaker Allen might have been. A famous admirer of Bergman, among other European auteurs, this was Allen’s serious film whose Bergmanian influence is worn on its sleeve. There’s many a carefully composed shot which goes against the usual Allen grain, giving the film a somewhat ponderous air which at times has the feel of a student homage. On the other hand, there are moments and scenes, in particular the wedding scene, which suggest a more emotionally invested artist than he eventually became. (There may be exceptions to this rule, such as Hannah and Her Sisters and Blue Jasmine). Allen will always be a curious figure, very much of the zeitgeist, revered and now despised in almost equal measure. His star is waning, and has been for many years, even without the scandal, so much so it’s hard to remember how influential and loved he was back in the dog days of the twentieth century. (Or should that be the glory days.) The Allen who turned down the Oscars to play with his jazz band, the one who had mastered the art of independent film making in a way no-one else quite managed in the USA, master of his own destiny, standing apart from the system. Interiors would be an example of this, the artist who was prepared to piss everyone off, the clown who suddenly starts acting in Chekhov plays. It suggests a destiny that Allen would never be able to pursue, because the truth is that his independence was always limited; it was always contingent on working within a lighter register which would make the stars who still queue up to work with him look good. In this context it’s worth celebrating the work of his cast, in particular Keaton, Marybeth Hurt, Geraldine Page and Richard Jordan, who were willing to forego the usual pleasures of being an engaging Allen character to join him on his curious mission to discover his inner, unironic artist. 

blue jasmine (w&d allen)

What to make of Allen’s curious tale of his protagonist’s demise? What to make of the unsympathetic husband who runs off with the teenage au-pair? It’s hard to get a handle on an Allen film these days, especially one which purports to adopt a female perspective. Blanchett’s Jasmine is a wreck of a woman, and on one level, it’s to the film’s credit that it portrays her warts and all, as she unravels, stitches herself back together and then unravels oncemeore. She is the trope of the neurotic, dippy but beautiful woman whose refusal to see what it going on around her will be her downfall, a downfall she in so many ways deserves. Nevertheless, to Blanchett’s credit, we can’t help rooting for her, even if just a bit. We want things to work out for her in the end, and when they don’t, it smarts. This is indeed, a three dimensional character, and there is a certain courage to be found in the construction and her depiction. Great characters can be a pain in the neck.  

The other less Flaubertian way of reading the film is as a critique of the excesses of Wall Street, although social commentary always rings somewhat hollow in Allen’s world. He is a director whose insularity lead to him treating the world as essentially a vehicle for his movies to be set in, an attitude as solipsistic and neo-imperialistic as that of his successor, Wes Anderson, who inherited Allen’s love of guest stars and ‘exotic’ locations. However, Allen at his best also riffs off of the loss of his European soul, the paradox of having cinematic power but lacking the cinematic profundity to match up to his idols. Allen’s very fecundity, his capacity to stitch together an off-the-cuff story with a few gags, which would always be financed, year after year, seemed to be something which, at the peak of his power he railed against. The creation of an anti-heroine, in the shape of Jasmine, is the fruit of the labours of this other Allen, a filmmaker who occasionally lived up to his own aspirations. 

midnight in paris (w&d woody allen)

Everything about Allen's career over the course of the last few years has put me off. I haven't seen much, but I was unlucky enough to catch Match Point. It's felt as though this is a sad, slightly undignified twilight, the one time genius peddling his wares where he can and, from the evidence of Match Point, creating picture postcard movies with Harlem Globetrotter casts and dodgy accents which possessed neither the wit nor the depth of his earlier works.

Midnight in Paris doesn't begin auspiciously. A long sequence plays out with documentary style footage of the city. A group of not-particularly-likeable North Americans are staying in a rich person's hotel and seeing the sights. Then, like a ray of light, Owen Wilson, the would-be novelist, is given a line which is vituperatively funny and gratuitously rude about the Tea Party. Politics infiltrating the late, bland Woody Allen? It's a promising sign. Soon afterwards, the narrative conceit kicks in, the handbrake is off, and the film turns into a delirious late-Allen masterclass.

The conceit is a simple one. Which is that Wilson discovers that if he waits on the right corner at midnight, he'll be whisked back in time to the twenties. Where he gets to hang out with all the greats. Allen has already mined this vein with Zelig, but here he incorporates it into a subtler, sadder narrative. Wilson's character, Gil, dreams of living in this epoch, when the US met Europe, when art still seemed to have a value greater than mere commercialism. And all of a sudden his dreams come true.

The conceit allows Allen to get his funny bone back. The innately comic scenario of Gil knowing things about Scott, Ernest, Zelda, Pablo, Bunuel and their ilk is mined for all it's worth. Wilson deadpans like a better-looking, younger Allen. Part of Allen's problem is that his films have never seemed complete without his presence, and the leading man all too often offers a version of Allen-lite. But Wilson has enough goofiness and character to pull the role off.

A lot of the lines are classic Allen and the ambition of the narrative is a throwback to his halcyon days, taking a real risk which pays off. There's another level to Midnight in Paris which is more subversive still, speaking to the audience not so much about the past as the present. Back in the real world, whilst Gil dreams of living in Paris, his wife wants to move to Malibu. Her parents are rich and sour. They go and see US movies which they can't remember the next day and the main attraction of Paris is its capacity for supplying antiques to furnish their homes they can't find in the US. Gil, intoxicated by the city, is pitched in direct conflict with his new family, and the consequences ring true.

Meanwhile, the film playfully reveals to Gil that you can't live your life stuck in nostalgia. The sharp script allows itself to follow through the logic of its conceit, revealing that the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, even when you've magically been transported there. The thwarted love affair between Wilson and Cotillard has echoes of Allen's great romances: love is a zero-sum game, where everyone's liable to end up being a loser.

You won't see another movie like Midnight in Paris, certainly not in the English language, because very few writer-directors are given the budget to indulge their whims and intellectual games in the way that Allen is given license to. He's written a script which is entertaining, effortlessly funny, wistful and subversive. Then he's filmed it with real vigour. Those who came to bury him, not to praise him, myself included, have egg on their faces. 

manhattan [dir. Woody Allen]

At the end of the showing in the ICA, an elderly man asked if they’d changed the film in any way, in the re-release. It's only a new print, but his reaction shows the freshness the film retains.

Most great US movies of the 70s were created on an epic scale – Coppola, Cimino et al. A few weeks ago I met someone who had been smuggled into Studio 54 when she was a teenager. She described an excess and a hedonism that has left anything else she’s seen in the shade.

There’s barely a hint of this in Allen’s Big Apple. He might appear drunk once, but that’s all. Instead, the film harks back to the twenties, thirties, forties. The dramatic use of the Manhattan skyline, which dominates the first five minutes, escorted by Gershwin, is as epic as it gets.

Which is a relief, and might explain why the film has aged so well. Men and women will always create drama in their lives, no matter what’s going on in the big wide world. The film’s keynote scene, with Allen having a showdown with his friend Yale in the presence of a Neanderthal- seeming skeleton drives this point home. It’s also the only scene where Allen seems prepared to accept that there is such a thing as a ‘wrong’ way of waging the battle of the sexes. He is genuinely aggrieved that Yale can twist and turn so recklessly, ruining at least two and perhaps three relationships at the turn of a Porsche ignition key.

Allen being Allen he retreats from any inclination to moralise. In his New York it may be as big a sin to criticise Bergman as it is to sleep with another man’s wife or another woman’s husband. The one guarantee of relationships is that they will cause pain, something he recognises by claiming the August Strindberg award for himself. And in a way, the movie seems to suggest, there’s nothing too wrong with this, because that pain lends meaning to life, which keeps us going.

And these things will carry on, no matter how the streets of the city might alter, no matter the prevailing trends in facial hair. Mistakes will be made and people will have to learn to live with them. Allen’s recognition of this is what lends his film a timelessness that revived me as much of a dull wintery London afternoon in 2006 as it might have done on a similar dull afternoon thirty years ago.