Film Noir

Rating: 7/10 (1 January 2006)

I'm always glad to see a new Woody Allen film and this is no exception. Here he returns to the dark, chaotic world he investigated in CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS -- his best straight drama, I believe -- and which he explored comically in BULLETS OVER Broadway -- his best comedy and you may disagree with both choices: a world without a god to impose a moral order which, tragically, destroys the men and women who inhabit it. A world of Film Noir that takes place across the river from London's Parliament where man's laws are made where he gives us a variation of AN American TRAGEDY. Yes, it can happen there.
There is a lot less Bergman influence in this movie. Instead the influences are visual touches: Hitchcock, Truffaut and others jostle each other in this script, the effective story of how a former tennis player cold-bloodedly marries into a wealthy English family -- "They've got nothing but money" he says trenchantly at one point -- and winds up murdering his pregnant mistress, the former fiancée of his brother-in-law. The script is brilliantly done and, even as he struggles to hide his crime, he wants himself caught. That desire to pay for his crime is the only thing that endears him to the audience, but it was enough to put the New York audience -- including me -- who sat through the showing on the first day of the new year in a similar mood. Would he be caught, which would give the universe some moral shape, or would he succeed in his quest for freedom and wealth? The script is topnotch, the cast performs admirably and the background of operatic music adds to the melodramatic tensions.
If the movie has any weakness, it is purely a comparative one: Woody Allen's New York films capture New York with subtlety. Wandering the streets of Manhattan, he can finds spots of beauty that would escape the casual eye: a scrap of paper blowing in the wind on 9th Street, the warehouse where the floats for the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade are stored, the cramped interior of a basement store in Chinatown. His views of London are more conventional in this movie: a river view of Parliament, the brick galleries of a London tennis club, the wood-and-leather library of a stately country home.
Perhaps, in time, Mr. Allen's perspective may bring us images of London that the natives have overlooked, but I doubt it. While this movie and his next, scheduled movie, also shot in London are worthwhile experiments, Woody Allen based in London is as unthinkable as Woody Allen in Hollywood. Come home, please, Woody. We need each other.