Film Review: Interiors (Woody Allen, 1978)

via Atlas Film
By Daniel Greenwood
This review is depressing (and contains spoilers).

The fun thing about watching a Woody Allen film is digesting it afterwards, chewing it over with the teeth in your head. But many people won’t get to the ‘afterwards’ part of Interiors, a film that is completely overcast. In three years - 1977, 1978 and 1979 - Woody Allen came up with Annie Hall, Interiors, and Manhattan. Holy carp, that’s three films better than any of the trillion some Hollywood directors make. In between Annie Hall and Manhattan, two little charmers, is one great big stinking misery fest. And you know what? I think it’s my favourite.

It’s a film about three sisters - Renata (Diane frickin’ Keaton), Joey (Mary Beth Hurt) and Flyn (Kristin Griffith). These sisters are torn apart by the protracted, messy divorce of their parents. Their mother Eve (Geraldine Page) takes the separation badly. She’s clinically depressed, introduced in a scene early on in the film where she obsesses about the positioning of a table lamp against a certain shade of wallpaper in Joey’s apartment. It’s unnerving to see someone so fragile to the colour palette of furniture. These small incidents are impressed against the harsh truth that her husband Arthur (E.G. Marshall) doesn’t want to get back together with his wife, he wants to marry another woman. Indeed, he does, and this wedding is the grand climax to Interiors, played out beneath the roaring waves of a bitter, Bergman-esque bay.

Renata is a successful poet. Her husband Frederick (Richard Jordan) is jealous of her, claiming her praise of his own work (which the critics ravage) to be lying on her part. The man’s a fool. He’s a drunk and an adulterer, typified by a scene where he pretty much attempts to rape Flyn, the youngest of the sisters, a beautiful and successful actress. But she ain’t happy, furtively snorting cocaine in the garage late into the wedding night. Renata toils with her lifestyle, what does she care if she has some poems left over when she’s dead for other people to enjoy. She’s unhappy with her life, almost oblivious to the small shape of her daughter that seems to flit on the fringes of Interiors.

Allen’s deftest manoeuvre here is his use of sound, the film’s complete lack of music. The only music that’s heard is from a record put on by Arthur’s newly wedded wife Pearl (Maureen Stapleton) - so it’s within the film. It’s quite clever, all the sound is interior. The crashing, early morning waves are terrifying, it’s as if Allen’s layered them over one another, and it gives the effect of fearing the water might come crashing through the screen. The action on screen is unclear and I found myself squirming, edging closer and closer attempting to see what was going on.

You could write a billion-word dissertation on these sisters, every performance is bang-on, every little thing about Interiors is aching and creaking, built on shambolic foundations. In the real world, people can’t get jobs, but here are people with a choice about their lifestyles - people who can make a living from art - forsooth! But man Allen has conjured some desperately unhappy characters in this elegaic, unrelenting piece of cinema.

Film Review: Vicky Christina Barcelona (Woody Allen, 2008)

via Atlas Film
By Daniel Greenwood

Rebecca Hall and Scarlett Johansson are Vicky and Christina, two close friends visiting Barcelona - Vicky is here to research for a degree in Catalan studies, Christina simply to tag along. Javier Bardem plays Juan Antonio, a Spanish painter who approaches the two friends in a restaurant and offers to fly them to Oviedo for the weekend. Vicky scoffs at the proposal but this kind of thing is just what Christina's looking for - a hunky painter man to show her something new, loins, even. Vicky is cynical of Juan Antonio, and unimpressed by his forwardness she dresses him down often. Christina suffers food poisoning, leaving Juan Antonio to show Vicky the sights of Oviedo. It's here that the two form a bond and Juan Antonio works his magic. But Vicky is engaged to be married, and her boyfriend Doug (Chris Messina) is never far away, calling Vicky's cell phone regularly. It's only after Vicky's really got to know Juan Antonio that she feels uncomfortable speaking to her fiancée. She pulls herself away from the artist, whilst he and Christina forge a sexual bond.

The dilemma at the heart of Vicky Christina Barcelona is whether to settle for a partner or to keep searching. Both Vicky and Christina struggle with this issue: Vicky is initially sure of her love for Doug, but Juan Antonio undresses its false premise; Christina falls for Juan Antonio, it was only the food poisoning that stopped them hooking-up, but in the end she's not comfortable with the triangle befitting herself, Juan Antonio and the brilliant Penelope Cruz as Maria Elena. Judging by the final shot and voice-over it seems that the closest thing these young women have to happiness is their friendship. Vicky is confident that wedlock is for her, but the allure of the world draws her away, filling her with desire. The Spanish guitar music is perhaps the most potent symbol of her longing for 'something else', this rapturous music entrances Vicky.

Allen's film is full of ideas. It has universal appeal and never sates itself with an answer to any of the questions arising from its characters. Each of these characters is belittled and wretched at some point, the narrative moves naturally, seamlessly from scene to scene. Scoop (2006) flailed because it was following a limp plot device - a serial killer - and I never got to (nor wanted to) peer inside the people. But here Scarlett Johansson typifies Allen's artless individual, someone who loves art (in this case photography, architecture) but cannot express themselves creatively. In 1978, Allen wrote and directed Interiors, a film about the disintegration of an unhappy family. Joey (Mary Beth Hurt) is Interior's 'artless' person, and she says it herself: how do people with all these emotions but no talent ever express themselves satisfactorily? Christina is an update on that problem because she manages to be artistic with help from Maria Elena and Juan Antonio. She learns to let things flow over her, to lose her preconceptions (what Vicky desperately struggles to do herself) and let her art come naturally. Perhaps for Allen talent doesn't exist, it's just confidence, or knack - something gained rather than God-given.

Vicky Christina Barcelona has a lot of depth to it. It's a comedy tinged with the painful ideas that swirl beneath its surface. It's classic Allen in that respect, though not funny like Annie Hall was, nor with the tragedy of Interiors (1978.) or Crimes and Misdemeanours (1989). In Rebecca Hall, Allen has an assured lead who commands the film alongside Penelope Cruz's harrowing turn and Javier Bardem as the believable sap.

Film Review: Scoop (Woody Allen, 2006)

via Atlas Film
By Daniel Greenwood

Scarlett Johansson is Sondra Pranksy, a bubbly, inquisitive student attempting to unravel the mystery of the 'tarot card killer'. Sondra attends a magic show starring Sid Waterman (Woody Allen) and, invited onto the stage, she partakes in a vanishing trick. Subsequently, she's visited by the ghost of Lovejoy (Ian McShane). Lovejoy appears and gives Sondra the scoop of the decade. He informs The Other Boleyn Girl that it is in fact Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) who is the 'tarot card killer'. So, The Girl with the Pearl Earring goes in search of this, 'the scoop of the decade', and in finding Wolverine she falls in love with him. Hugh Jackman's character is buff, so it doesn't matter if it's obvious that he's the killer. In the mean time, magician Sid Waterman is doing card tricks and sometimes he's left alone to joke with himself. He isn't making cutesy attempts at breaching the fourth-wall or anything. In fact, it's not quite clear what he's doing. Thus does that very same confusion seep into this review.

In The Guardian's G2 supplement last May critic Joe Queenan wrote an article entitled 'Europe, please stop funding this man'. This man is Woody Allen. Queenan was pleading with European film companies to stop falling for Allen's ploys. The article gives the sense of Allen as a criminal on the run from the American intellectual hegemony, a bit like Roman Polanski steering clear of U.S. borders. It's like Allen is an infection, and Europe now has an itchy rash:

The ex cathedra pronouncement that Woody Allen comedies were no longer in vogue came as no great shock to most regular moviegoers, and certainly not to people under the age of 30 (sticklers who prefer comedies that are actually funny), as it had been widely reported in other outlets that the once-revered actor/ writer/director hadn't made a film worth seeing in years, and nothing vaguely approaching the quality of Annie Hall, Broadway Danny Rose, Manhattan, The Purple Rose of Cairo, or even Bullets Over Broadway. People didn't talk about Woody Allen movies any more, not even people who had been breathlessly waiting for his latest release since their university days.

By watching Scoop you can see Queenan's point. It's peculiar to think that Woody Allen directed Manhattan, a paean to that part of New York, shot in glorious black and white film stock and underwritten with a Gershwin score. It's peculiar that Allen is that same director because Scoop is so bad. The quality of the camera work is dire, not that the movement of the camera was ever the most important part of an Allen film, the script or witty improvisation always was a greater pull. It's also to do with the acting too, which is diabolical. Scarlett Johansson has one mood - inquisitive - and it doesn't matter if she's pretty, she's not worth watching. Her character is supposed to be annoying and is thus even more annoying. Her closest friend Vivian (Romola Garai) is a young woman who talks simply of 'fit blokes', prancing around like the secondary school drama student that she is. Sorry, but middle class, posh London girls don't act like this. They're irritating, yes, but never wooden.

Scoop plays like a poor Three Men and a Little Lady (Emile Ardolini, 1990), at least that has some humour in it, at least something is at stake (classic altar chasing stuff). Allen is annoying here, it's sad to watch, in that it's embarrassing. Indeed, the obligatory middle-to-upper-class English country house scene is awful, and Wolverine has never looked so relaxed. He's better with mutton chops on his face, cutting people. It remains to be seen whether Allen has 'returned to form' with Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2009), but any upward curvature is no excuse for this bore-fest.