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"There's an old joke," actually older than Woody Allen lets on, Shaw's Galatea out of Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. The artist as gag writer, raised under a Coney Island roller coaster and choked with cosmic dread. "The horrible and the miserable," everybody's story. Brooklyn is not the universe, there's also the Midwest and Los Angeles, the heroine (Diane Keaton) comes from the former and leans toward the latter. She's the chanteuse unnoticed at the noisy nightclub, he's the wisecrack-dispenser who gives her a copy of The Denial of Death. (They get their first kiss out of the way before dinner, "now we can digest our food.") Beginning and end of the relationship, dissection of the dead shark with plenty of divagations for lobsters. "I'm not discussing politics or economics. This is foreskin." Fads and frauds everywhere, not "a large sock with horse manure in it" for the windbag but Marshall McLuhan in the theater lobby. Frigid WASPs and grumbling Jews, a matter of crossing the split-screen. The technique is Gilbert's in Alfie filtered through Godard's faits précis, stand-up into confessional into yearning reverie, a suit of "moods and hang-ups." Subtitles for small talk, the perfect date movie that is The Sorrow and the Pity. Keaton's great whirlwind of flutters and guffaws, as magically nervous as Jean Arthur, suddenly still and aglow for a performance of "Seems Like Old Times" noticed by Paul Simon himself. New York harmonies, plus an early Christopher Walken aria. (The camera pans from morbid driver to concerned passenger, cf. André and Octave in The Rules of the Game.) Conspiracy theories with the first wife (Carol Kane) and Kafkaesque sex with the reporter (Shelley Duvall), all leads back to the ex-girlfriend's bathroom for a tussle with oversized spiders. "That was wonderful. I love being reduced to a cultural stereotype." A watershed for Allen, further advanced in Manhattan. Cinematography by Gordon Willis. With Tony Roberts, Colleen Dewhurst, Janet Margolin, Russell Horton, John Glover, and Johnny Haymer.
--- Fernando F. Croce |