The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen (43 page)

17

And What a Perfect Plot

Everyone Says I Love You
and
Zelig

Look, I-I love you. I know that o-only happens in movies, but… I do.

—Gil to Cecilia in
The Purple Rose of Cairo

Allen’s implicit self-appointment as a devotee of the goddess of love in
Mighty Aphrodite
—his declaration representing more of a reenlistment than a new commitment—involves him in a contradiction which the films he has yet to make will find extremely difficult to resolve. Acknowledging the differences between Lindas physical ripeness and his own small stature and advanced years, Lenny jokes that “At my age, if I made love to you, they’d have to put me on a respirator.” In fact, he seems to survive their amorous night together nicely, leaving her with a daughter as if in reciprocation for the son he has from her, and the subsequent visualization of his rambunctious lovemaking with Amanda once they’ve reunited reinforces the idea that there’s enough life left in the old boy that he’s recovered his ability to “find it” again.

Throughout Allen’s work, film-resolving affirmation has nearly always necessitated the erotic convergence between the protagonist and her/his love interest. The ending of Sandy Bates’s movie in
Stardust Memories
makes the link between existence-affirmation and romantic resolution most explicit: he’s still on the train whose destination remains a mystery to him with the Hogarthian grotesques for fellow passengers—the basic condition of his life hasn’t changed. What
has
changed is that he’s with Isobel. “But it’s not as terrible as I originally thought it was,” he tells her, “because-because, you know, we like each other, and-and… uh, you know, we have some laughs, and there’s a lot of closeness, and the whole thing is a lot easier to take” (p. 376). That this affirmation is only the ending of a movie-within-a-movie doesn’t completely ironize its point, which other Allen films dramatize even less equivocally..”[T]hat’s pretty much how I feel about relationships,” Alvy Singer explains, “you know, they’re totally irrational and crazy and absurd and … but, uh, I guess we keep goin’ through it because, uh, most of us need the eggs”
{Annie Hall,
p. 105). The dilemma repeatedly evoked in his recent films takes the form of an as-yet-unanswered question: what is there to affirm once aging has rendered us less capable or less eligible egg-gatherers than we once were?

Allen’s idea that Eros is the only magic is emblematized best by Andrew’sspirit box in
Midsummer Nights Sex Comedy,
which “penetrates the unseen world.” What the spirit box ultimately projects are images of lovers, of sexual trysts in the woods, each of the characters perceiving the box’s projections as dramatizing her/his own sexual fantasies or possibilities. Only the hyper-rationalist Leopold
sees
no shadow of himself and his desire for Dulcy, until the ending engineers his conversion into a “glowing presence on summer nights,” a spirit evocative of the undying power of sexuality.
Sex Comedy
affirms the idea articulated by Frid in Bergmans
Smiles of the Summer Night:
.”There are only a few young lovers on this earth…. Love has smitten them both as a gift and as a punishment.” The summer night smiles for all, Frid continues—“for the clowns, the fools, the unredeemable … who invoke love, call out for it, beg for it, cry for it, try to imitate it, think they have it, lie about it.”
¹

For a filmmaker whose primary if not only source of affirmation has been the “very, very resilient little organ“—the human heart—and the redemptively distracting webs of romantic involvement and entanglement it projects into the world, the prospect of aging provides a particularly daunting challenge. (Shadowing that issue further are the strikingly
un-Hannahesque
implications of Allen’s most-quoted rationale during the public imbroglio with Mia Farrow, “the heart wants what it wants.”) For a while now, reviewers have been none too diplomatically wondering whether Allen isn’t getting a little old to be playing romantic leads, and for all the anatomical/spiritual congruences of its “what are your charms for … what are my arms for?” sentimentality,
Everyone Says I Love You
contains an obvious undercurrent of this very real artistic conflict. That subtext plays itself out in
Everyone
not only through the film’s necessity to generate romantic closure, but also in its recurrently conjured anxiety that to be without “the eggs” is to have no identity, no self at all.

On its very lovely surface, however,
Everyone
represents Allen’s attempt to make a movie that is light, engaging, and enchanting without being trivial or transparent. From its lushly visualized opening scene in which Holden (Edward Norton) and Skylar (Drew Barrymore) winsomely but untunefully sing “Just You, Just Me,” the film immediately announces its strategy: it’s a musical in which people who aren’t singers regularly burst—or, in Allen’s case, shrug—into song.
²
David Denby, a reviewer generally willing to attempt to understand Allen’s purposes in a film before lambasting it, noted the singers’ vocal incapacities and took them for an exercise in egalitarianism: everyone loves, he argued, so everyone sings. Locating the ancestors of this film in Hollywood musical comedies, Denby explains what it means when Astaire dances: he’s in love, he’s gotta dance. The only way to visualize the exultant feelings Astaire’s character is experiencing is for him to dance and sing them; the only way to manifest the togetherness forged by his and Ginger’s love for each other is for them to kick up their heels. “Everything builds up to those numbers,” Denby contends, “and the greatest of them, exploding on the screen, made us happy in ways that perhaps nothing else in movies can equal.”
³

Allen, who closed
The Purple Rose of Cairo
with one of the most beloved of such scenes—the Astaire/Rogers “Cheek to Cheek” duet from
Top Hat
—would very probably agree, though his framing of their dance redefined its significance considerably. What Denby underestimates in comparing such classic song and dance numbers to those in
Everyone
is that even when Allen celebrates these grand movie moments in his films, their framing conveys an implicit skepticism about them. The image of romantic consummation embedded in the Astaire/Rogers choreography clearly does nothing to alter the circumstances waiting outside the Jewel Theater for Cecilia—except, perhaps, to reinforce the illusion that there is something for her in the world other than Monk and the Depression, thus incapacitating her to deal effectively with those inescapable realities. The consolations of even Hollywood’s most radiant scenes are suspect in Allen’s skeptical aesthetic because they are necessarily fabrications, artifices whose capacity to reassure exists in inverse proportion to their relationship to truth. However much his own films are the product of his having grown up with the beautiful illusions of what he calls “champagne comedies“—the shimmering Radio City Music Hall scene in
Radio Days
best epiphanizing this connection—Allen nonetheless exhibits a consistent mistrust of his own tropism toward the celebration of such moments on-screen. The skeptical side of Allen’s attitude toward such romantic epiphanies, the religious language excepted, closely parallels Cynthia Ozick’s description of the anti-artifice tendencies of her short story, “Usurpation.” “It is against magic and mystification, against sham and ‘miracle,’” Ozick suggested, “and, going deeper into the dark, against idolatry. It is an invention directed against inventing, the point being that the story-making faculty itself can be a corridor to the corrup-tions and abominations of idol-worship, or the adoration of magical event.”
⁴

The Purple Rose of Cairo
is, along with
Stardust Memories,
Allen’s most fiercely ambivalent depiction of films capacity to incite “the adoration of magical event.” Although
Everyone Says I Love You
is a substantially lighter film than either, its musical comedy impulses, like its construction of late middle age romantic impulses, are nonetheless more equivocal than its relentlessly cheerful narrative implies. Both of these equivocations culminate dramatically in the poignant
pas de deux
on the Seine, which is simultaneously Allen’s lovingly parodic homage to Hollywood romantic dance numbers and the film’s emotional climax. Until then, the cares predominantly evoked by the film are limited to those Holden exuberantly croaks about: “My baby just cares for me.”

Djuna (Natasha Lyonne)—the DJ of the narrative—explains at the films end that when she decided her family’s story should be a movie, her half-sister, Skylar, suggested that she should “make it a musical or no one will believe it.”
⁵
(That American college-age young women in 1996 would want to make such a film seems unlikely; that the music they’d choose for their musical would be Broadway show tunes forty years old is an anomaly the film never seems to find anomalous. It’s one of a number of unscrutinized felicities which allow
Everyone
to cleave to its ebullient course.) And so the film begins with DJ introducing her family by affirming, “We’re not the typical family you find in a musical—for one thing, we’ve got dough.” (Perhaps the only musicals she’s seen are
West Side Story
and
A Chorus Line.)
The inherited wealth of her mother, Steffi (Goldie Hawn), and the lucrative law practice of her stepfather (Alan Alda) enable the family to live in a plush Manhattan penthouse and to travel to Paris for Christmas to celebrate the holidays in a suite at the Ritz. When DJ’s father’s summer month with his daughter rolls around, he whisks her off to Venice; consequently, the film, exquisitely photographed by Carlo Di Palma, visualizes not only the beauty of Manhattan in summer, fall, and winter, but it also captures the loveliness of Paris and Venice, the departures from Allen’s undeviating New York settings constituting one of the movie’s many manifestations of expansiveness and surprise.

Once the narrative begins to unfold, it becomes clear that
Everyone
is a much lighter addressing of the “resilient little muscle” of the heart theme which underlies
Hannah and Her Sisters
. Nearly everyone in the movie (other than Grandpa, who dies) is falling into or out of love, a number of different characters—Allen’s Joe Berlin included—getting to try their voices on melancholy versions of “I’m Thru with Love.” (Even DJ’s fourteen-year-old half sister, Lane, when dumped by a crush in favor of her sister, Laura, tearfully warbles a chorus of the renunciatory tune.) One of the film’s running jokes is DJ’s endlessly mutating infatuations (a Venice gondolier, an American college student, a rap singer who hilariously translates “I’m Thru with Love” into his own idiom, a celebrant at the closing Paris Cinemateque ball) and the self-serving rationales she uses to justify her breezy rotations from one flame to the next. For adults in the film, of course, love isn’t such a comically self-perpetuating matter: Joe has had little luck in his search for a replacement for Steffi, his former wife, his pursuits having coupled him with a nymphomaniac and a drug addict. DJ’s junior procuress campaign to supply her father with ro-mance constitutes much of the films minimal plot.

In
Another Woman,
Marion Posts accidental overhearing of a patients psychoanalytical sessions with her therapist in an adjoining apartment begins the protagonist on the progress dictated by the final line of her favorite Rilke poem: “For here there is no place that does not see you: you must change your life.” The analysand, Hope (Mia Farrow), is a young woman who, Marion learns when they become acquainted, fears becoming the passionless, cerebral woman Marion is. Therefore, Hope represents a sort of self-projection who precipitates the necessary change in Marion which is the films psychic/dramatic dynamic.
⁶
Everyone Says I Love You
reprises the same situation of psychiatric eavesdropping, treating it comically.