2. Stardust Memories
By the late 1970s, Woody Allen had managed to achieve a pretty damn enviable level of celebrity. He was a well known comedy star, a successful stand up, an Award winning filmmaker, he was sleeping with Diane Keaton, and he had a relationship with United Artists that basically allowed him to make whatever movie he wanted. Take the Money and Run, Bananas, Sleeper, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, Love and Death, Annie Hall, Manhattan...with each movie Woody got better as a writer, director and actor, gradually transitioning from just making "gag comedies" into much richer, more "adult" comedies with melancholy undertones. Even the widely criticized Interiors was seen as just a hiccup, a noble if misguided attempt to Bergman. In the eyes of his adoring fans, Woody could do no wrong. Then in Stardust Memories, he spat in their faces. The film starred Allen as a neurotic (surprise, surprise!) film director trying to transition from making silly comedies to making more serious dramas -- sound familiar? Stardust Memories was full of allusions to European filmmakers, particularly Fellini, which earned it charges of pretension. More damningly, it was also full of digs and jibes at people who liked Woody Allen's movies. Allen's fans -- or the fans of his
character, "Sandy Bates" -- are depicted here as swarthy, distorted, cretinous hangers-on, obsessively pestering him everywhere he goes, insisting they have some connection with him, even attempting to kill him. Even visiting extra terrestrials tell him that "We love your movies -- especially the earlier, funnier ones!"
The critics were kinda sorta right on one score -- Stardust Memories
is a rather self indulgent movie, even by Allen's standards. But then this is a guy who made a (sometimes disastrous) habit of combining his personal and professional lives, and to his credit, Allen makes Stardust Memories a very
knowingly self indulgent film; it manages the simultaneous trick of being sort of pretenious, and making
fun of its own pretensions. Viewed outside the context of its creation -- i.e. a time when Woody Allen was the biggest name in the film world -- it's easier to not feel the movie is some sort of personal attack (as a lot of critics did) and see it, instead, as the culmination of the first period of Allen's work. Allen's movies had been growing ever darker, even more interior, ever more personal, but there had always been the veneer of quick wit, goofy humor and Gershwin music; here that veneer is removed -- Stardust Memories reveals Allen, as writer, director and cinematic persona, at his darkest. Sandy Bates
is a whiner, a complainer, and the film manages to trick of both sympathizing with him and openly criticizing him; here Allen lays out quite clearly his failures as a lover, his failures as a filmmaker, the ways in which he feels he's been pidgeonholed and the ways in which he feels he's been emotionally and intellectually trapping himself. When the audience leaves the premiere of Sandy Bates' latest film at the end of Stardust Memories, it's as if Allen is closing a chapter in a book: this is who I have been, this is who I am, and this is who I will continue to be.