Cinema
Cut-price
Peter Ackroyd
Stardust Memories ('A', selected cinemas) The only person who takes Woody Allen seriously is Woody Allen. 'I've got to find meaning' he announces towards the end of Stardust Memories, forgetting that he should have tried much harder to find an audience first. His face has the slackness of an old onion; his hair seems to fall Out in clumps whenever he moves; his voice, squeezed with difficulty through those grimply pursed lips, has the whine of a child screaming for more more of everything. But the eyes betray his age now: sometimes they are tired, with the dazed unknowingness of a man who has stared for too long at his own reflection, and sometimes they're just dead. When he kisses those attractive young actresses it is Charlotte Rampling here; but as if in self defence, she moves only at half speed he looks like an old lecher come home to roost. There is something disgusting about a film-maker who lays his fantasies upon an audience with such eagerness and determination. It is also impolite.
None of this would matter if Stardust Memories vyas an interesting film. But it isn't: it is Woody Allen's cinematic memoir, the autobiography of an egomaniac. It is 'written and directed' by him in the way that a mass murder can be said to be both planned and committed. But when actors become self-conscious, they behave very much like reformed whores: too much guilt, and far too much talk. The story here is of a cult figure who has grown tired of his cult; Woody Allen plays a fashionable comic whose adulation has turned him into an object, a possession owned jointly by his film company and his fans. He feels harassed, jaded, out of place, misunderstood: we know this because he tells us so every second minute. It is difficult, however, to sympathise with anyone who takes himself so seriously and his is not, in any case, an original complaint. Show business exposes of show business account for more hours of boredom in the cinema even than Ingmar Bergman. And when Stardust Memories reverts to some of the more outdated tricks of the 'avant-garde' cinema there is even a film-within-a-film to delight the senior citizens in the audience the banality of the whole enterprise becomes clear.
Stardust Memories has that knowingness combined with irony that passes amongst cut-price intellectuals as a constituent of a thoroughly modern sensibility. The film has even been made in black-and-white, since this is now the fashionable thing to do. The conventional references are all here Schopenhaeur, suicide, psychiatry, like cheap goods at a white elephant sale held in New York. It is a peculiar feature of Woody Allen's films that he thinks it enough to mention something in order to persuade people that he understands it. In this sense he represents the fine point of American culture, which might be defined as the triumph of vulgarity over barbarism. When he can think of nothing to say, he says it. But he suffers also from another American fault: he assumes that irony is enough. He parodies himself in order to escape external criticism (this is, after all, the theory of modern American art), with a number of jokes and 'one-liners' at his own expense. But he forgets that a fault is actually compounded when it is taken seriously enough to become a joke, Stardust Memories, then, is a vacuous film. When Woody Allen ceases to be comic, he has nowhere else to go. He seems unable to understand or describe reality, and turns instinctively to the hollow and portentous images of fantasy. He tries to intellectualise without being intelligent, to be witty without first being perceptive. In the process, he is too willing to trust his audience not to get 'bored in other words, he expects thefin to be as interested in himself as he is. Here he has made a fundamental mistake: one tires very quickly of his second-hand insights, his borrowed culture, and his self-conscious naivety. Woody Allen is in love with his own image and, like some tiny Narcissus, is now drowning in his own inanition.
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