Stardust Memories opens in the style of European angst-ridden art cinema, presenting, quite uncharacteristically for a Woody Allen film, an elongated silence aboard a train where Woody himself sits blankly amidst a host of people he believes are staring at him. The train begins moving, Allen grows paranoid and bangs on the walls to get out, and eventually he finds himself and the passengers trudging a deserted plane littered with heaps of smashed car parts, quiet save for the solemn wheeze of the wind and the caws of the circling crows. Obviously, the scene is heavily redolent of both Federico Fellini and Ingmar Bergman, two of Allen's most cherished directors; precisely, it is an homage to opening scenes from two of their works, respectively: 8 1/2, where Mastroianni's character is trapped inside a car in a traffic jam, and The Silence, where the young Johan travels on a train to an unknown destination (at least figuratively), the rhythmic exchanges of light toppling over his face much like they do to Allen's and his fellow passengers. This unexpected repose jarringly concludes to reveal silhouetted film producers bickering about how it's too pretentious, too arty, and that it ventures into that tired territory of art reflecting anguished state of minds. Of course, they look at it in an unfairly reductive manner, for the sequence, which proves to be test footage for the new film by comic director Sandy Bates, is actually one of those moments of touching homage in Woody Allen's career, and it succeeds marvelously. The fact that it is so compelling despite its briefness, and that the jabbering, half-witted entertainment heads respond to it so negatively, speaks both to a central conflict in the film and Allen's rebellious stance.
This conflict deals with Bates' desire to flee from the satirical comedies that made him a filmmaking icon and move towards richer, more mature pieces of art that reflect reality and human suffering, while his audience insists he remain a purely comic genius. Trouble is, Bates doesn't feel funny anymore; there's no passion to compel him forward with the type of works shown at his popular retrospective. Imbued with a bit of Bergman's own life (the retrospective takes place on a bleak seaside), Sandy Bates is clearly a doppelgänger for Woody himself at this point in his career, although that certainly doesn't imply that Allen ceases to be funny. A frequent line spouted off at Bates by his omnipresent fans is that they especially enjoy his "early, funny ones". The first five or six films of Allen's career are frequently referred to as his "early, funny ones", and while Stardust Memories often times shares much in common with these films, it's also one of Allen's most bracing attempts at cinematic art rather than just a slapped-together, one-off comedy romp.
A vivid example is Allen's structural play in the film. Rarely in his career does he venture out of his comfort zone, which is mainly straightforward narratives. Here he undoubtedly aims to adopt the extemporaneous weaving of past and present, reality and fiction, and memory and dream that is not only specifically reminiscent of Fellini's 8 1/2, but also more generally of Godard, Bergman, and Antonioni. Bates' confused, casual interest in three woman - his emotionally feral ex-girlfriend Dorrie, his current French lover Isobel, and an intellectually earnest young brunette he meets at his retrospective - is depicted in an atemporal manner, the three figures fusing into the film at random times to illustrate the immediate nature of Bates' attraction. Not only does this uncertainty in romantic affairs contrast strongly with Allen's head-over-heels devotion to women in films like Annie Hall and Sleeper, but it lines up evenly with the 60's arthouse treatment of the modern woman as beautiful but distant and enigmatic. The assembly line of raucous fans begging for autographs or artistic explanations - who more often that not look directly into the lens as we adopt Bates' perspective - frequently set off unexpected detours to completely different scenes to emphasize the need for escapism, a concept that directly recalls Mastroianni's impotent director in 8 1/2. Allen shifts between these moments with surprising efficiency and impact, suggesting a director with a capability to do more than just tell one-liners.
What do all these intertextual references add up to? Well, I think they're little more than Allen's warmhearted tributes to the cinema he loves. Some would say this is insubstantial or solipsistic, but what matters is how deftly Allen handles it all, displaying a sharpness and brevity (like many of his films, Stardust Memories concludes at a measly hour-and-a-half) that is often absent from the films of Fellini, Antonioni, or Godard, where tangents from the narrative last a great deal of time. Stylistically as well as structurally, the film pushes the boundaries of Allen's work, some of the crisp black-and-white camerawork becoming impressively formal at one point and then forwardly experimental the next, such as when Dorrie, played perfectly by Charlotte Rampling, breaks down in front of the camera via close-up, a frenetic series of fourth wall explosions that unquestionably are meant to remind us of Liv Ullmann's camera address in Bergman's Persona. Similarly, in an earlier scene, Allen provides a long close-up of the blond Isobel (Marie-Christine Barrault) as she pulls her hair back, mirroring another shot of Bibi Andersson in the same film. Stardust Memories' most poignant achievement though is the ineffable mood it evokes that lasts with the viewer in a way that his loose comedies don't: the feeling of mortality and insufficiency breezing through with the lightness of the crows in the opening sequence, and of the attempt to grapple with warm memories during an irritatingly impersonal event.
0 comments:
Post a Comment