STARDUST MEMORIES A
USA (91 mi)
1980 d: Woody Allen
I don’t want to make funny movies any more,
they can’t force me to. I don’t feel funny. I look around the world and all I
see is human suffering.
In my family nobody ever considered suicide,
this was just not a middle class alternative, my mother was too busy running
the boiled chicken through the de-flavorizing machine to think about shooting
herself.
To you, I’m an athiest. To God, I’m the
loyal opposition.
The Way of Zen. What are you trying to tell
me, that I’m not at peace, right? I think I need more than a Zen book, I need
either a good rabbi analyst or an interplanetary genius.
—Sandy Bates (Woody
Allen)
I’m doing this piece on the shallow
indifference of wealthy celebrities and I’d like to include you in my
piece. —Film festival fan
My mother shops in the same butcher shop your
mother does. Can I have your autograph? Could you just write: To Phyllis
Weinstein, you unfaithful, lying bitch?
—An adoring fan
A dark and unflinchingly honest film, an autobiographical
equivalent to Fellini’s 8½ (1963), where a confused and neurotic, yet highly
successful fictionalized American film director, Sandy Bates (Woody Allen), has
doubts about the meaning of his existence and suddenly, through the use of a
cleverly experimental film style, finds himself thrust into the middle of a
Black and White Fellini movie. Clearly
inspired by the great directors of European art cinema, like Bergman, Fellini,
and Godard, to name a few, Allen pays tribute to them all with this modernist,
existential homage to cinema itself, filled with an unconventional, plotless
style that mixes flashbacks and brief vignettes of real life with dreams and
fantasies, creating an impressionistic, stream-of-conscious effect . Baron is constantly surrounded by an enveloping
throng of wellwishers, where he can’t help but think perhaps he’s wasting his
time telling jokes and making lighthearted comedies that the public loves
instead of doing something more meaningful with his life. But while he’s constantly besieged by adoring
fans, all calling him a genius and comparing him to God, though they are
unanimous in their preference for his funnier, early works, he spends most of
his time pursuing frivolous encounters, fluttering from woman to woman, like a
butterfly in heat, always wanting to be at the center of attention. While he realizes the superficiality of his
own narcissism, he constantly vacillates over what he really wants, which is
usually whatever woman he can get his hands on, where Allen’s libido
rules. While this inventive style was
not altogether new, as the public got an earlier glimpse of it in Bob Fosse’s
legendary All That
Jazz (1979), this was a complete shock to Allen’s moviegoing audience, many
finding it “too angry,” breaking the mold of conventional comedy, so the speak,
and branching out anew with an altogether radical vision, something like Persona (1966)
was in Bergman’s career. Despite the
intent to expand the boundaries of Allen’s cinema, the film flopped with the
public and most of the critics, where Ebert and Variety didn’t like it, eventually just breaking even
financially. This is Allen’s final film
for United Artists before moving to Orion Pictures, but looking back today, one
has to acknowledge this was a major risk that turned into one of the director’s
most creative efforts in his career.
While the film is an expression of New Wave cinema
vocabulary, where startling images and jump cuts are meant to keep the audience
on edge, but what’s most revelatory is the insight it offers into the artistic
journey, where the director is literally assaulted by a collective of well
meaning, but often intrusive business associates, many threatening the artist’s
control, where they want to recut the ending of his movie and send his
characters to Jazz Heaven, thinking they know what’s best, but what they really
want is not new ideas or artistic development, but what sells tickets, keeping
the artist confined to making the same kinds of films over and over again, as
this is the successful business formula.
Art, however, wants to break free of this suffocating stranglehold, like
Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, Picasso breaking from
Surrealism into his Blue period, and later Cubism, or Dylan bolting from folk
music, never knowing exactly what lies ahead, but knowing the journey is all
that matters. After an opening scene
that is amusingly European influenced, an existential fantasia of fear and
paranoia, with the claustrophobic Allen trapped in a train car much like
Marcello Mastroianni in the opening moments of 8½ was trapped in a car in the
middle of a giant traffic jam and can’t escape, both leading to strange
surrealistic dream sequences, the lights come on and the movie moguls describe
what they’ve seen, which can be summed up by an uncredited Laraine Newman, a
film producer, “He’s pretentious, his filming style is too fancy, his insights
are shallow and morbid. I’ve seen it all
before. They try to document their
private suffering and fob it off as art.”
While Bates is wrestling with the making of a film, he’s also struggling
with his life, where one of the more interesting effects is the changing mood
of a giant wall-sized photo backdrop in his apartment of The
Execution of A Vietcong Guerilla | Iconic Photos that later turns into Groucho
Marx when he’s happy, a continually changing device he uses on a half dozen
occasions, including Sandy Bates standing in front of a giant photo of Allen at
one point. Early on we see him with his
gorgeous but mentally unbalanced former girlfriend Dorrie (Charlotte Rampling),
resembling his own Lauren Bacall, who initially captures his eye by
speedreading through Schopenhauer, where we hear him whisper tenderly into her
ear, “I think they’ve been putting something wonderful in your lithium.”
While attending a retrospective of his work at the Stardust
Hotel in Atlantic City (organized by none other than Judith Christ), Bates
reflects upon his life and loves, the inspirations for his film, but is on the
verge of a mental breakdown, seeing the world from a distorted view, where
memories and fantasies are seamlessly woven into his reality, as he continually
goes through a whirlwind wave of adulation and praise, while thoughts keep
creeping in, like a childhood Superman image, seen taking off in his backyard,
or various old-school renditions of vaudeville style cabaret songs, where he
sees himself as a young onstage child magician, The Amazing Sandy, levitating a
ball to thunderous applause. The film
loses all sense of time, jumping back and forth between incidents, where he’s
also introduced to Daisy, Jessica Harper from the opening scene of Suspiria
(1977), where they have a transforming moment together after viewing THE BICYCLE
THIEF (1948), while at the same time reflecting upon his life with Isobel,
Marie-Christine Barrault from early Éric Rohmer films of the late 60’s and
70’s, supposedly an ex-radical from France.
At some point Bates is in love with all three women, or so it seems, but
always more obsessed with the idea of love, something that’s always been
missing in his life. Even during
life-changing moments of great impact, adoring fans continue to approach him,
where he instinctively deals with both simultaneously, not even realizing what
he’s doing. In much the same way, his
mind incessantly wanders through an interior, imaginary world, where in some of
the finer moments we’re able to catch glimpses of the director’s “hostility” as
it goes on a rampage through Central Park leaving behind plenty of dead bodies,
pursued by the police and tracker dogs, or Bates actually proposes to Isobel
while she’s doing grotesque facial exercises.
Even an extraterrestial named Og appears, again confirming the
intergalactic consensus, “We enjoy your films — particularly the early, funny
ones,” while UFO’s descend to earth in hot air balloons, gloriously filmed by
Gordon Willis, but there’s also a paranoid fantasy about getting assassinated
by a rabid autograph hound, where the release date of the film predates the
assassination of former Beatle John Lennon by psychotic fan Mark Chapman by
just over two months. During a
posthumous speech where he believes he’s already dead, Bates describes that singular
moment in his life that epitomizes his life’s meaning, a moment with Dorrie in
his apartment where she’s lying on the floor flipping through a magazine, where
their eyes and thoughts meet, with Louis Armstrong playing “Stardust” in the
background, The
Movie Roman Coppola Has 'Seen A Million Times' : NPR YouTube (2:11). Rampling has two of the film’s best moments,
as she’s also seen doing an extraordinary dramatic riff on Bergman’s PERSONA Charlotte
Rampling in Woody Allen's "Stardust memories" YouTube
(1:30). While there are plenty of
bickering and disjointed moments in the film, where Allen’s character is not
entirely likeable, there are also ravishing sequences that are among Allen’s
most brilliant, which includes the affecting quality of the ambiguous ending,
where STARDUST MEMORIES may be the most autobiographically transparent film he
ever made.
