104 in 2009 Week 22: Stardust Memories

Just one this week. Ah, well.

Stardust Memories
Woody Allen, 1980

Sandy Bates (Woody Allen) is a successful filmmaker who is known for lighthearted comedies, but now feels he’s been wasting his time and wants to make more substantial fare. While attending a weekend festival of his work, he struggles to stop the studio from imposing a happy ending on his latest film, reminisces about his past with Dorrie (Charlotte Rampling), contemplates a potential future with Isobel (Marie-Christine Barrault), and tries to figure out who he is and why he is the way he is.

This is easily my favorite of the Woody Allen movies that I’ve seen, primarily because it is the first one that seemed to take full advantage of the medium. I’m not just talking about the gorgeous black and white photography, but about the things that you can only do in film, like Dorrie’s jump-cut fractured semi-monologue toward the end, or the flashback in which Sandy (and the audience) watches Dorrie reading a magazine, while she becomes increasingly conscious of his/our gaze. These are the moments that bring the piece to life, and they’re not things you could do in, say, a stage production – unlike most of Allen’s work, which I think would be perfectly at home on stage.

To be fair, the movie does run the risk of becoming over-simplistic and trite at times, what with Sandy’s constant kvetching about comedy seeming pointless in the face of all the suffering in the world. This is well-worn territory, which was pretty definitively explored in the mediocre but highly regarded Sullivan’s Travels. I don’t think we’re meant to take this message at face value, though – Sandy’s problem isn’t that he can’t figure out the benefit of comedy in the face of suffering, but that he is asking the question in the first place. Whereas Sullivan’s Travels (and the aliens in this film) give us the easy answer that comedy relieves suffering, Stardust Memories presents a more nuanced view that Sandy is dealing with a false dichotomy. Dorrie makes him miserable 28 days out of 30 (as several characters point out), but the remaining two days make him happier than anything else in his life. The good and the bad in life feed on each other, you can’t have one without the other, etc. . . actually, that also sounds kind of trite when I put it that way, but I suppose anything does when it’s reduced to a single sentence. There's a lot more ambiguity in the movie.

Technically, there isn’t really anything I could complain about other than Jessica Harper’s performance feeling a bit flat. Oh – and keep an eye out for the ever changing breakfast nook walls.

9/10

Progress: 47 (Par +3)