Lovely, Calvino-like celebration of stories.

Rating: 7/10 (9 August 2000)

'Sweet and Lowdown' has been compared to everything from 'City Lights' and 'Raging Bull' to 'La Strada'. Formally, the film is more ambitious than any of these. It reminded me of Anthony Powell's roman fleuve, 'A Dance to the Music of Time'. Powell's novel, in the wake of 'Ulysses', seems very traditional, a straightforward historical narrative, mediated by a controlling narrator. Similarly, 'Lowdown' seems utterly conventional, both in narrative progression, and in its assertion that the life of a jazzman is bleak and emotionally unrewarding - the image of Emmet Ray, alone, at night, by an empty railroad depot, huddled, crying, his guitar in smashed fragments, would not seem out of place, with variations, in films like 'Young Man with a Horn', 'Round Midnight' or 'Bird'.
Powell's narrator, Nick Jenkins, tells the story of himself, his family, friends and acquaintances over a period of 50 years. Jenkins' civilised detachment makes him utterly trustworthy, and we are likely to take him at his word. However, much of the narrative is based on hearsay, or the stories of others (often second- or third-hand), unreliable to say the least. Combined with the mnemonic hesitancies of old age, the processes of denial, evasion and embellishment, and Nick's own rarely elucidated personal motives, the novel's mode makes for a highly unstable text, much less conventional than on first glance; where very little is certain, and 'truth' and 'witness' are compromised notions.
The effect of Allen's film is somewhat similar. Never mind that the film is a 'fictional' documentary - all fiction films are, minus the formal apparatus (and surely everyone knows by now that documentaries are no more objectively truthful than anything else). But, within the reality of this fiction, there may be no reality at all. The only truthful thing (on the level of fiction) is the opening intertitle, which gives the brief bald fact that Ray existed, made a few records which some consider beautiful, and then disappeared from public view. All the rest, as in 'The Virgin Suicides', is an accumulation of hearsay and anecdote, so that the Ray that we see in the film, the truly obnoxious, emotionally constipated (the depiction of which was alarmingly familiar), misogynistic, kleptomaniacal, infantile genius, is not Ray at all, but a 'fiction' of his biographers, complete with cod-psychology. Like Shakespeare, all we have of the man is the work. So the film's apparent theme is irrelevant - can a personally repellent human being be an artistic genius?: we only know the fruits of the latter.
That argument was always old hat anyway, although still unresolved, its most obvious difficulty being Wagner - how can a man who, with Shakespeare, plumbed human depths few knew existed, and did so with such all-consuming beauty; how could such a man, quite seriously, call for the destruction of an entire race (the Jews) to whom he preferred his dogs. If Allen seriously wanted to discuss this theme, he would have used a figure like Wagner - Ray's music is easily dissociated from its begetter's awfulness; indeed, like Amadeus, it seems independent of him. Wagner's anti-Semitism, on the other hand, is the life-blood of his work, the Jews being the Other that must be ridiculed and expelled from its purifying strength.
Another problem is that those of us unversed in the intricacies of the jazz guitar will be ignorant as to how great Ray truly is. His music sounds pleasant enough, but one is hardly struck with wonder - and as the film's two emotional moments (Hattie's look when he plays after sex; and the last great recording played over his desolation) require an appreciation of its power, I was left a little unmoved.
My reference to Powell was not entirely gratuitous. There is an astonishing sequence in 'Temporary Kings' in which an enigmatic event is interpreted kaleidoscopically by the different versions and interpretations of it told from varying degrees of proximity. There is a similar scene here, when Emmet follows Blanche and her gangster lover to a petrol station, where the narrative, linear enough for all its ellipses and uncertainty, breaks down, and the film becomes a celebration of storytelling. It is irrelevant which version of the tale is true; each one is told with a master's skill and is equally enjoyable and provocative.
We remember that Allen has parodied 'Pale Fire' and Borges in his comic prose. The whole film is a series of vignettes, as we only know Ray through legendary tales, some comic (the 'moon' scene is justly celebrated), others emotionally difficult, all evincing a Calvino-like love of the tale, the anecdote. So although there is a pleasing irony that a man of huge, destructive ego is actually a non-presence in his own non-story; and while art is unproblematically celebrated, it is reassuring to see that for Allen, combining the love of the sketch of the early films with the resonant maturity of the later work, the tale will always be the thing.