Play it again, Woody
by Paolo Valassi
It seems that Woody Allen has created yet another masterpiece. According to some critics, the recent Midnight in Paris (2011) is the New Yorker's best film since Macht Point (2005).
First of all, let's clear up any misunderstanding: I think Allen is a great man and that he has given us films that will remain in the history of the seventh art. But like every artist of cinema (from Chaplin on down) and not only of cinema, Woody is experiencing a parabola that has seen him reach the peak in the decade from the end of the 70s (Annie Hall is from 1977) to the end of the 80s (Crimes and Misdemeanors is from 1989). Since the 90s he has made some decent or, in some cases, good directorial efforts that, however, do not possess the originality and brilliance of the works released during the aforementioned decade.
The two recent films considered the best, namely Match Point and Midnight in Paris, actually revolve around themes developed with much greater incisiveness in two absolute masterpieces such as, respectively, the aforementioned Crimes and Misdemeanors and The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985).
If we want to be bad, Match Point is simply a London-style remake of Crimes and Misdemeanors. The story of the New York ophthalmologist from Crimes and Misdemeanors who is persecuted by his lover who he eventually has killed rather than destroy his upper-middle-class Jewish household is transported to London. The ophthalmologist becomes an Irish tennis player who climbs the social ladder by marrying the daughter of a wealthy family (is this a reference to Barry Lyndon?). When the tennis player takes her lover and even gets her pregnant, everything seems lost and to avoid this he kills her by simulating a robbery. In Match Point Allen takes up the themes of crime without punishment, of the dulling of conscience and self-absolution but without the depth of Crimes and Misdemeanors where at least two key characters were present: the rabbi Ben who is progressively losing his sight, symbol of a God who does not see everything and who leaves human beings to their ethical-moral drift; and the philosopher Levy, the only critical and rational voice in the film who however in the end takes his own life by “going out the window”, a clear reference to Primo Levi who committed suicide in 1987.
The other pair of films, on the other hand, share the theme of escape from reality.
In The Purple Rose of Cairo, the escape takes place through cinema: Tom, the cinematic hero of the protagonist (Cecilia, played by Mia Farrow), physically comes out of the screen and begins a love story with her. The film cannot proceed and so the production assigns Gil, the actor who plays Tom, to go to Cecilia and help her convince Tom to “return to the screen”. This plot allows Woody to reflect on the meaning of cinema as a dream machine and a mechanism for escaping from an alienating and cruel reality that we are forced to live.
In Midnight in Paris, the escape from a disappointing and frustrating world takes place instead through a car/time machine that every night, at midnight sharp, transports the protagonist to the era he longs for, the 1920s, where he will have the opportunity to meet, among others, Hemingway, Dalì, Gertrude Stein, the Fitzgeralds, Picasso, Man Ray. Among the encounters is also that with Picasso's current lover and Modigliani's ex ("with you, groupies take a leap in quality...") who instead would like to live in Paris in the late 19th century.
Bottom line: no one is happy where they are, as Antoine de Saint Exupery says in The Little Prince, but we must be content with our time because nothing can allow us to escape our time and ourselves.
“The public always wants to see the same films. Instead, we must disappoint them, otherwise nothing interesting would be done in art.”
How far away are the times when Woody uttered this phrase.