BEFORE: I'm also going to skip "Manhattan", because I've seen that one before. Also, it features Woody Allen playing an adult man in a relationship with a much younger woman, and I'm afraid that one comes a little too close to his actual personal life. Plus that's just plain icky now.
THE PLOT: While attending a retrospect of his work, a filmmaker recalls his life and his loves: the inspirations for his films.
AFTER: Well, at least this started out as a topic that I know something about, which is film festivals and retrospectives. I've programmed a few Plympton retrospectives at some notable festivals, which is a lot of work for me, but of course helps to raise his profile in whatever part of the world chooses to feature one. And having Woody's character, Sandy Bates, speak about his filmography was a great framework for working in some of his one-liners (as responses during the Q&A session) but also a chance to poke fun at his real-world critics, who by this time were wondering why he stopped making comedies.
I'm assuming that this was familiar territory for Mr. Allen as well, at least at the time this was made - not only visiting film festivals, but meeting women and picking up women. I finally figured out that the events seen in this film were not meant to be taken in literal order - perhaps the visit to the film festival is the framework, and while at the festival the filmmaker is sorting through his memories about past relationships. However, this was not exactly made clear.
Without any frame of reference, or any organizing timeline, even if the fragments allow for excessive time-jumping, it's tough to put them in any kind of order. We see him living with an actress, then later there is a scene where he first meets her on a set, and then later in the film we are told they've since parted ways, and the actress is living in Hawaii. Other scenes have Bates involved with an ex-girlfriend who has just left her husband, and he wants her to move in with him - I wondered how this arrangement would work, since he apparently was also living with the actress at the time.
Also, we never get to see the dissolution of any of these relationships - it's meet and seduce, meet and seduce. Again, without any reference to a timeline, I just thought that the central character was practicing some form of free love or juggling multiple relationships, as opposed to serial monogamy.
Even if I allow for non-linear storytelling, it's essentially the same situation over and over - at some point it ceases being drama and crosses over to bragging - look how many relationships I can have!
I'm also not sure what the metaphors were supposed to mean, or if indeed they were metaphors at all. Sad people ride a train to a junkyard - meaning what, exactly? What do the train and junkyard represent? What about the hot-air balloons? And the space aliens?
In the end, I maintain that something could have been done, something SHOULD have done, to organize this better and make things clearer. Putting subtitles on the screen reading "Five years ago" or "Six years earlier" would be clunky, but at least the job would have gotten done. Filming the present scenes in color and the flashbacks in black and white would have been another option, but I understand that could have been problematic in itself. Perhaps genuinely using the Q&A session as a framework, with each question and response triggering a different memory - that's maybe the route I would have suggested. But I wasn't asked.
Also starring Charlotte Rampling (last seen in "Melancholia"), Jessica Harper (last seen in "Love and Death"), Marie-Christine Barrault, Tony Roberts (last seen in "Play it Again, Sam"), Daniel Stern, with cameos from Sharon Stone (last seen in "The Quick and the Dead"), Laraine Newman, Louise Lasser, Brent Spiner.
RATING: 4 out of 10 autographs
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