Starring: Woody Allen, Judy Davis, Antonio Albanese, Roberto Benigni, Penelope Cruz, Fabio Armiliato, Alessandra Mastronardi, Alessandro Tiberi, Riccardo Scamarcio, and Alec Baldwin.
Distributor: Sony Pictures
Runtime: 112 mins. Reviewed in Oct 2012
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This romantic comedy is written and directed by Woody Allen. Four sub-stories are in the same film: an obscure office worker wakes up one morning to find that he is a celebrity, an architect (with Alec Baldwin as actor-commentator) goes back to a city street where he lived as a student, a young couple get separated on their honeymoon with unexpected results, and an ageing opera director spots a special talent for singing in unusual circumstances. All sub-plots are unrelated, except for one brief scene where some of the characters come together, and the time-frame for the different episodes varies – some are over weeks, and others are over days.
Rome features vibrantly in the movie throughout each of the stories in something of the same way that Paris featured in Allen’s “Midnight in Paris” (2011), Barcelona did in his “Vicky Christina Barcelona” (2008), and London did in his “Match Point” (2005). In this movie, it is Rome’s turn, and the city is there in all its glory, showing off its fabulous architectural ruins, and ageless places, including the Spanish Steps, the Colosseum, and the Trevi Fountain – all treated affectionately in the movies of Federico Fellini. One could regard parts of this film as a special tribute to Fellini, who Allen obviously admires.
None of the stories is about romantic love in the classical sense that made films like “Roman Holiday” (1953) and “Three Coins in the Fountain” (1954) so popular. The love affair is with Rome.
The most successful of the four stories is the one about Jerry, a retired opera director (Woody Allen), who is a critically-reviled director of avant-garde opera, best known for his production of “Rigoletto” in which he dressed all his singers as white mice. He visits Rome with his critical wife, Phyllis (Judy Davis), to meet their daughter’s fiancée.
There are some wonderful comic moments in this story. Anxious about his career coming to an end, Jerry discovers accidentally that the fiancée’s mortician father, Giancarlo (Fabio Armiliato), is a great singer, but he can only sing when he is in the shower. Jerry wraps him in a towel and arranges a bathroom for him on stage, so that his singing talent can be appreciated. The episode demonstrates how well Allen mixes the plausible and the ridiculous. The story is comic and dramatic, and it touches on the themes of marriage, disappointment, ambition and death. The script that Allen has written for this episode (and others) characteristically passes comment on his own life.
Other episodes take up equally familiar themes. For example, an Italian worker, Leopoldo (Roberto Benigni), who leads a boring life, discovers that he is a temporary celebrity overnight for no apparent reason. Suddenly he finds himself hounded by photographers and beautiful women, wanting to know what underpants he wears, and how he shaves. Being “famous for being famous” is something he doesn’t understand, but he misses the fame when it is gone.
Allen brings back familiar faces, like Judy Davis, and a luminous Penelope Cruz, who plays a prostitute, Anna, who gets entangled with a newly wed, Antonio (Alessandro Tiberi) by mistake. Antonio’s wife (Alessandra Mastronardi) is being seduced by a movie actor (Antonio Albanese) in a Fellini-type Roman chance encounter, but ends up having sex with a hotel thief (Riccardo Scamarcio) instead. The inanity of it all is vintage-Woody Allen.
Despite some high comic moments, this is not the best of Allen’s “city” movies. It is too much a smorgasbord of discrete episodes, and integrated too loosely around the theme of fame. But it has lots of witty one-liners, and it is surreal, implausible, and entertaining. And then there is Rome.
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