Second in a series: The Dawning of the Age of the ACA: Looking
askance at pop and political culture of 2011–now
Also fits this series:
“We’ll always have Woody”: A look at Woody Allen films
Subsections below:
An unusual love story for Allen
Characters aplenty
Technical notes
This film’s storyline is pretty
straightforward; the film as a whole is far simpler than either You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger
(2010) before it or To Rome with Love
(2012) after it. Amid other features, it is one of his travelogue films, made
in Europe in the 2004-11 period, and its enchantment with Paris, a city as ripe
for photographing as any, is shown in its different-for-Woody Allen initial-title sequence.
After a very few initial textual
identifiers (in his white lettering on black screen), a long series (three
minutes or so) of shots of different buildings, boulevards, and other vistas is
unrolled, reminiscent of the beautiful shots of New York City (which set a
standard for initial sequences) at the beginning of Manhattan (1979). Playing underneath is tasteful music (seeming
like a French type of jazz, with saxes, oboes [?], and trumpets; and a simple repetitive-figures
melody).
Then Allen’s usual
white-lettering-on-black background title sequence continues, but now we hear only
some initial dialogue underneath—by Owen Wilson’s
Gil Pender and Rachel McAdams’ Inez, Gil’s
fiancée—including Gil’s rather-plainspoken enthusing about Paris.
An unusual love story for Allen
Interestingly for Allen, this
film doesn’t stray too far from that initial blast of “Paris love” in photos
and talk; Allen romanticized the city over the many years, which is heard in
stray remarks through many of his films, including the likes of Husbands and Wives (1992), all as if by
a wistful New Yorker who never quite got the wherewithal together to go.
Finally Allen did (though this happened as a function of his several-year
involvement with European film-producing companies, the one here being Mediapro [End
note], which was behind Vicky
Cristina Barcelona [2008] and Tall
Dark Stranger), and the result is a film that, unusual for Allen, is
downright reverent in terms of honoring a city other than New York.
The story features some “magical
realism” of the type that, in Allen’s work, may not have occurred since The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985). Here,
what I think is employed is an example (conceptually from the sci fi genre) of
the “time slip.”
And as a story, MIP is fairly slight. Dealing with this
film lately along with the very interesting Blue
Jasmine (2013) and a set of unusual distractions in my life, I am a little
apt to dismiss MIP as a lightweight,
almost annoyingly-thin summer entertainment. More objectively, MIP is like a short story stretched out
into a 90-minute film, while Blue Jasmine
is like a small-to-medium, serious novel stuffed into a 90-minute film. In MIP, even the story element—so common in
Allen—of one romantic relationship breaking down and another taking its place
seems surprisingly muted and morally “as it should be” for an Allen film.
But I don’t want to say MIP is a waste of time; it is a very
tonally nice example of late Allen, when he crafts a fairly simple story that is
long on pleasing impression (rather like Vicky
Cristina Barcelona) and, while including literary allusions, short on cause
for a lot of audience thinking. More to our benefit, as a result of Allen’s “finally
being able to rhapsodize about Paris,” it is quite pleasant.
Characters aplenty
Michael Sheen, here sporting what seems an American accent, is
on hand as Paul, an American pedant (in Paris on business too; he is to lecture
at the Sorbonne); helping the MIP story,
he is giving commentary for tours around Paris to Gil, Inez, and company. Inez
and Paul eventually have a romantic relationship going that supplants Gil’s
with Inez, and oddly for an Allen film, this change of relationships doesn’t
come with much sound and fury, and it seems to suit both Inez and Gil, who himself
then takes up with a pleasant French woman who works in a nostalgia shop.
Kurt Fuller plays Inez’s dad John, who is in Paris to
consummate a business deal, as the ostensible reason Gil and Inez are also
there. Fuller seems a good choice to play a hard-ass dad; he also played the
hard-headed boss “Mr. Head” in Adam Sandler’s Anger Management (2003).
##
This film is a good work of
Allen’s “for college students” (such as he occasionally did starting around Zelig [1983]), with a slew of famous
names dropped that liberal arts majors can have fun picking out and
identifying.
Among the famous names
encountered here are writers F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway (the film
is worth seeing just for the parody of Hemingway; Corey Stoll plays him); painter and sculptor Pablo Picasso; composer
Cole Porter; and others.
And consider other famous names
and their assigned actors:
* Gertrude Stein is played by Kathy Bates,
here well-cast as a sort of take-charge Earth mother-cum-cultural dean; if Stein
here had the foul mouth of the mother Bates played in About Schmidt (2002), Bates would have provided a Gertrude Stein
for our time;
* Adrien Brody is a sort of suitably weird Salvador Dali; and
* Alison Pill is the famously unstable Zelda Fitzgerald.
Marion Cotillard plays Adriana, a passion-driven woman (and
cultural camp follower of sorts) who (at least per the film’s story) has
affairs with several artistic names (from the 1920s, from whence she also
comes), along with Gil.
The film seems almost weak in
how it wraps up Gil’s odyssey, an odyssey in which he gets more entranced in
visiting the famous figures from the 1920s, whether or not for feedback on his
novel-in-progress. Adriana wants to, and gets to, go back (with Gil) to the
1890s, and it is in a visit to this decade where she and Gil have a
philosophical discussion, heralding their “splitting up,” where she says that
as a writer, he is all about words, while she is about passion. Gil for his
part says that as a writer, he has to remove himself from illusions in his life
as much as possible, and this means reducing nostalgia in his life. (This
paraphrases.) This almost seems like Allen boiling down how he sees himself as
a writer when he is being more clear-eyed realistic and less romantic.
Meanwhile, adding to Allen’s
whimsical mix of fantasy and realism, it is a critique by Ernest Hemingway of
Gil’s novel that sets Gil on the path to resolving something knotty in his own
life. This is where Hemingway has detected that an affair has been going on
between two characters in Gil’s novel, and Gil then infers that an affair has
been going on between Inez and Paul, who are the source for Gil’s fictional
characters. Amazingly, as a result of this, Gil and Inez seem to part ways, in
the end, fairly amicably.
Technical notes
Darius Khondji, becoming one of Allen’s go-to production partners
(working on four films for him in his post–Di Palma phase), handles cinematography.
An early scene (with Gil and
Inez kissing) is set, I believe, at the famous pond from which Claude Monet got inspiration for his water-lily series of
paintings. (My sister and her husband, on vacation, visited this location this just-past
summer, and once home they showed plenty of photos from it.)
A fairly glaring script error
(or an actor’s bad improvising?) is when Gil tells someone from the 1920s that
he is “from the 2000th millennium,” which of course makes no sense.
He is from an era within 2000+ years that have passed until now, in the “Common
Era” (or anno Domini), but the
millennium he is in is the second.
Allen also employs little comic
tricks that, if in other directors’ films, would be considered rather
unoriginal types of jokes as if influenced
by the better films of Woody Allen. For example, Gil tells Hemingway that a
case can be made that all American literature as descended from Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. I guess Gil gave the
Old Man a good idea for a literary pronouncement, because Hemingway, in real
life, did say this.
Gil similarly seems to give
another famous figure an idea for future work when he suggests a story idea to
Luis Bunuel, a one-time associate of
Salvador Dali’s who would much later make films. I don’t know any of the
background in the real Bunuel’s career to know what film Gil is giving him a “clue”
to doing.
End note.
