Tears in the eye of the rhinoceros

Rating: Null/10 (30 November 2011)

With some films in you, you should probably now by now how to handle Woody Allen, what is or isn't worth your time; the visual imagination, beautiful or borrowed; the snarky wit, acerbic or whinging; the nervous tics and anxieties, relatable or complacent.
I happen to not be attuned at all with him, and have only moderately enjoyed a few films a long time ago. He looks up to Bergman, I am an Antonioni person. So I will always resolve in favor of cessation, concentrated mind, detached perception, and the idea that the content of the mind does not matter one bit - which both him and Bergman anxiously probed about - so long as we get to understand the mechanisms that give rise to it and give rise to images with an eye on an awareness that liberates from them and opens up horizons.
Here we have one such film about internal mind, and in a form that appeals to me; the look from inside the mirror, in an effort to give us actual in-sight of the mind weaving stories.
For this to work, we need to be able to make concessions. We also need to be nostalgic for the golden afterglow to warm us. We need to be willing to be transported to where not everything makes sense. We need to give in a little to the fantasy as though it was our own.
So for most of the film we get to wander around a dreamy 1920's Paris all in an effort to apprehend the circumstances that would provide inspiration and strength to overcome insecurities back in the waking world. Back where an airheaded blonde wife waits for us to have dinner in the fancy restaurant, the disapproving parents, the suave sexual antagonist; a cast of shrill stereotypes out of a Woody Allen film.
The lesson that we fish inside the fantasy is the expected, the only one that can be valuable. It is a dangerous chimera to indulge the mind; now matters, there was never any other world, any world more beautiful.
But it does remain on the whole a film where the fantasy is a superficial romp, with the important realization merely tucked at the end of a good time. As it turns out, there was nothing in the bottoms of this mind that is a shadow from the surface, or a particularly deep encounter, beyond of course getting to meet the woman of one's dreams. How poignant it would have been for example, if the anxieties above were recast inside the fantasy in forms that we know from movies? What Lynch has done so ingeniusly. There is none of that here, just the love letter already stamped.
In the middle of so much art and so many encounters with the people who made it, the greatest art however remains this city of lights. It is truly a cinematic jewel, and Woody's virtual wandering is the best thing next to living in it.
If the premise here appeals to you, I recommend that you seek out films by the filmmakers who inherited surrealism as the means to re-invent cinema. The journey from that short with the sliced eye from the period referenced here that Bunuel did with Dali to Welles who parodied that stuff at the time but used that eye to slice narrative, to how Raoul Ruiz transfigured Welles. Start with Ruiz, who recently passed away. Woody's film is breezy but decorative.