Woody Allen, 2011
I was going to front and start off by telling you that I only went to see this because my dad wanted to, but the truth is I’ve seen a lot of the late-era Woody Allen movies (and actually have yet to catch the critically-deemed “good ones” like Match Point and Vicky Cristina Barcelona) and have never really regretted watching any of them. Because I am a child of people who are members of his first generation audience, I saw the new stuff before I ever saw the old classics, and thus the films I saw are not cheap imitations of some former glory but rather a theme park whose ethos appeals very strongly to the nerdy preadolescent I was when first introduced to his work: Woody World, where neuroses are an attractive, even laudable commodity and you have to do very little work to feel included in and at one with the patina of urban sophistication that pervades his consistent milieu.
The exchanges between our protagonist Owen Wilson and the pompous windbag played by Michael Sheen (an actor who I’m finding increasingly intriguing) will, to those versed in both old and new school Allen of the intellectual standoff that ends with the fantasy intervention of Marshall McLuhan in Annie Hall. And in fact much of Allen’s work comes from this places of exasperated, unrecognized superiority. But Allen wisely concludes that no mere mortal, no matter how sophisticated or fascinating, can compete with Paris, and I think the film works better than many of his past efforts because Allen keeps his ego right-sized and acknowledges thoroughly his position as starry-eyed pilgrim before the City of Lights.
I respected and really connected with this position because it so closely mirrors my own. I studied French for eight years in school (it’s slipping away, but I’m taking a refresher course this summer), but I’ve only been there three times for all-too-brief vacations. And the more I learn, the more I realize that I don’t know the real France at all, but I’m still dwelling in this fantasy land where the food is so good and the sites so beautiful that anyone with even the slightest artistic inclination couldn’t help but be inspired. Thus watching the film made me wistful for experiences and feelings I haven’t experienced. Who knows, maybe I’ll make it there someday.The allure of the memory of expats in Paris in the 20s also resonates with me, as evinced by a period of by life where I decided I was going to become the female Henry Miller by doing every weird slummy thing I could think of.
