Review by Pamela Zoslov
Woody Allen, who
has just released his 43rd film, To Rome With Love,
has become like that elderly uncle you remember from your childhood
for his brilliant sense of humor, but whose increasingly feeble jokes
you now laugh at out of polite nostalgia. He remains a formidable
filmmaker — last year's Midnight in Paris was
a thoroughgoing success — but his insistence on making a film every
year means that lately there are more misses than hits, and the
misses are all the more disappointing.
To Rome With
Love, set in the colorful
Italian capital because backers put up the money for it to be shot
there, is based on a collection of half-developed ideas Allen had
tucked away in his desk drawer. The randomness and mustiness of the
stories is evident.
Allen
toyed with several ideas for the movie's title, including The
Bop Decameron, a nod to The
Decameron, a 14th-century
Italian novel consisting of 100 tales, and Nero Fiddled, before settling on the one that evokes the late-'60s TV series starring John Forsythe.
To
Rome With Love features a
handful of unrelated stories about tourists and residents of Rome.
One story involves an ordinary businessman, Leopoldo (Roberto
Begnini) who suddenly becomes a celebrity for no reason — “famous
for being famous.” Paparazzi follow him everywhere, beautiful women
throw themselves into his bed, and he's ushered onto a TV talk show
to talk about what he had for breakfast. The point of this minor
vignette, presumably, is to comment on the shallowness of modern
celebrity culture, something Allen explored in more depth 32 years
ago in Stardust Memories.
Another story involves a Roman mortician (played by Italian tenor
Fabio Armiliato) who can sing opera sublimely, but only in the
shower. Allen plays a retired opera director whose daughter is
engaged to Giancarlo's son. When he hears Giancarlo's shower aria, he
devises an unconventional way to bring him to the stage, a visual
punchline that's not particularly funny, but is nonetheless repeated
twice.
A clumsy bedroom farce has a pair of Italian newlyweds, Antonio
(Alessandro Tiberi) and Milly (Alessandra Mastronardi) have their
honeymoon interrupted by a gorgeous prostitute, Anna (Penelope Cruz),
who shows up at Antonio's hotel room by mistake, just ahead of the
arrival of his very conservative family. Both Antonio and Milly, who
is meanwhile wandering the streets of Rome, having lost her way in
search of a beauty salon, experience unexpected erotic awakenings.
The
most successful of the stories has Alec Baldwin as John, a successful
architect revisiting the city where he spent part of his early
career. He is recognized at a street corner by Jack (Jesse
Eisenberg), a young architect who idolizes him. Jack takes John to
the apartment he shares with his girlfriend, Sally (Greta Gerwig).
The street corner is analogous to the metaphysical Paris alley where
Owen Wilson was whisked into the 1920s; John becomes a kind of
ghostly presence in Jack's life, a mentor-advisor who comments on the
action and warns Jack about the danger to his relationship posed by
the impending arrival of Sally's supposedly sexy, irresistible friend
Monica, an actress. “Can't you see that the situation is fraught
with peril?” John warns his young, naïve protege. (John functions
like Humphrey Bogart in Allen's Play It Again Sam).
Monica
is one of those patented pseudo-intellectual Allen heroines, mouthing
sophomoric pronouncements and quotations from Kierkegaard, Pound,
Yeats and The Fountainhead.
As embodied by Page, her vaunted sexiness is overstated, but her
manipulative seductiveness works on Jack, challenging his loyalty to
the level-headed Sally. (A younger, precocious brunette often tempts
an Allen hero away from his sensible blond mate — art imitating
life imitating art, I suppose, in Allen's case.) Baldwin, the
funniest presence in this not very funny movie, comments sardonically
on Monica's pretensions as she speaks (“Oh, God, here comes the
bullshit”), a conceit not unlike Marshall McLuhan's walk-on in
Annie Hall. This story
also goes nowhere special, but there's a certain amount of fun in
getting there.
To Rome With
Love is Allen's seventh
European-made film, something he calls a “happy accident, because I
couldn't raise money any other way.” The 77-year-old filmmaker
spoke to the New York Times about
his lifelong affection for Italian cinema, citing four films that
influenced him: Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves and
Shoeshine, Antonioni's
Blow Up and Fellini's
Amarcord. Even before
his European cycle began, he was channeling Bergman (Interiors)
and Fellini (Stardust Memories).
Allen's latest film is a pretty anemic tribute to the films he
admires; worse, it even fails to recapture the magic of his own best
work.
