Manhattan Murder Mystery: Escapist Comedy

One in a series of rather silly features from Woody Allen from the ’90s into the ’00s, Manhattan Murder Mystery acts as a sort of trivial extension of the earlier Annie Hall. This superficial fact doesn’t warrant its dismissal by critics as a forgettable chapter within Allen’s sizable canon. It has the flavor of a whodunit?, the tone of any of Allen’s best comedies, the aura of Allen’s New York, and the philosophical implications of Allen’s best comedies or tragedies. On this note, it is fascinating how traditional is Allen’s approach to theatrical art, typically falling on one side or the other of this classical distinction. See Melinda and Melinda for his explicit exploration of this dichotomy. Alan Alda’s presence in the case of Manhattan Murder Mystery recalls his character in Crimes and Misdemeanors, who explains with firm conviction, “Comedy equals tragedy plus time.” This tense relationship is something that fascinates Allen, and although his films often can be placed on one or other side of the barrier, he often refuses so simple a distinction. In the film now before us, which can pretty easily be categorized a comedy, the dark subject matter and allusions to perhaps that darkest of film genres (film noir) are indeed ultimately swallowed up in satire and comedic tribute.

And since it’s so difficult to avoid a parallel examination of Woody Allen the man alongside his films, it should be noted that the production of Manhattan Murder Mystery came immediately following Allen’s notorious personal scandal, leading to a divorce with Mia Farrow. If comedy is the (at least temporary) antidote to tragedy, Manhattan Murder Mystery may represent Allen’s cinematic escape from his own troubles. His replacement of Farrow with Diane Keaton not only hearkens back to Keaton’s roles in both Annie Hall and the similarly titled Manhattan, but also to her symbolic status as Allen’s formidable co-star during his earlier, less tragic years. In this way, one might even read into his invitation to Keaton to take over the part originally written for Farrow as Allen’s own personal Midnight In Paris. With a stormy present raining down on him, he can only reach back into the past to recover some piece of his romanticized past. And not  his past, only, but cinema’s past. Scenes shown within the film Double Indemnity along with a conclusion that simultaneously presented and re-presented Welles’ The Lady from Shanghai indicates Allen’s lifelong infatuation with the better, “golden” age of film. It may be true that their appearance in this film reflects Allen’s debt to them, his admission that he can’t equal them without parodying them, etc. However, beneath these surface possibilities is a more subjective truth evincing Allen’s insecurity over personal tragedy pushing him into the realm of comedy. (Images via)

Midnight in Paris: From One Flâneur To Another

Bored in the monochromatic present

What the ex-advisor said was true and remains true: you haven’t seen a film unless you’ve seen in (at least) twice. So, for as lighthearted in tone as Woody Allen’s latest is, one must revisit it to say much about it that’s worth hearing. That being said, here we are after only one viewing. Midnight in Paris is unashamedly nostalgic, with the theme written into not only the film’s main text but its subtext – Gil’s novel even revolves around the owner of a nostalgia shop. This fact, and Woody Allen’s regular identification with the male protagonists of his films, parallels his own status as the “novelist” behind the film. Like Gil, he too is a sentimentalist at heart (albeit a sharp, educated one) who makes films about what he loves.

Meeting the charming Fitzgeralds

The opening mélange of scenic images of Paris has already been likened to the introduction to Allen’s Manhattan, but without the funny and over-the-top romanticism for the city that Allen’s own voice overlays with those earlier images. Instead, here Allen employs the music of Cole Porter, perhaps as an acknowledgement of his own muteness concerning Paris, his linguistic breakdown with the inhabitants of the city. Indeed, in Gil’s midnight world, he is inundated with not only well-known historical and literary figures from the 1920s, but largely with American ones. Whomever he encounters, they all speak English – even broken English in the case of Salvador Dalí. This linguistic cooperation of the famous figures isn’t to imply that Gil’s experiences are fantasy – that would be missing the film’s point. Rather, Allen treats the narrative content of his film the way Wes Anderson treats his in The Darjeeling Limited. These filmmakers are self-acknowledged flâneurs, traversing a land that is not their own, featuring characters that likewise understand something of their cultural limits even while somewhat obliviously romanticizing places and times that are foreign to them. These films set themselves apart from others, such as the overhyped Slumdog Millionaire, which rather more imperialistically stampeded a foreign culture with the pretense of a Westerner who believed he could know it and say something about it.

Like Groundhog Day, but better

Allen, on the other hand, treats his subject matter for what it is. The opening montage keeps Paris at arm’s length, with almost entirely static shots that may as well be postcard images. The fact that it’s Paris, and not some small town in southern Provence, only serves to strengthen the argument that we are occupying, via cinema, the most hallowed ground of romanticized cities in the world. All the big sites are visited, with the viewer led along by Gil, an American born in Pasadena and working as a writer of sub-par Hollywood screenplays who hardly knows a lick of French. But he doesn’t need to. Indeed, one can read into the narrative beyond the film; the day Gil learns French is the day when Gil loses part of his nostalgia for the city. For in the same way that Adriana inadvertently teaches Gil not to sentimentalize the past (a temporal realm), Gil should eventually learn not to romanticize Paris (a spatial realm). This could be the only significant blind spot in Midnight in Paris. While fully conscious of its own nostalgic nature and the correspondence between its protagonist and its author, the consequences of its nostalgia are only partially acknowledged. It has been noted recently how often Woody Allen has been moving outside of his beloved New York to make films. He has recently made a number of movies in England, Spain, and now France. Has New York lost its charm? Has this most romantic of spaces (for Allen) changed, leaving Allen longing for a temporal period in the past? (Which only begs the real question: what “is” “New York”? Does it have an inherent essence? Can a city “change”?) This notion was already largely evident based on his previous depictions of New York, as seen most markedly in Manhattan. (For instance, his use of black and white pulls the viewer into a different temporal period than the contemporary one.) And if, as seems likely, Allen’s affinity for New York is being replaced, or at least temporarily set aside, for the likes of London, Barcelona, and Paris, why is his main critique of nostalgia in Midnight in Paris merely temporal and not also spatial? The film concludes with Gil and his new Parisian ami walking away at night, in the rain, into the belly of Paris. Gil has learned his lesson about re-envisioning the past as an inherently superior time than the present. Still, he settles into Paris with contempt for his home in southern California, and with all the naïve optimism of Adriana when she and Gil were ushered back to La Belle Époque.

Here or now; choose only one

That Obscure Object of Desire

No one accused Buñuel of subtlety.

Viewed in three sittings, a screening as fractured as the identity of the titular object. She only serves as a distraction for the viewer in her dual performance. She is the trap successfully sprung by herself onto the obsessive, unsuspecting “subject,” a gracious title that can only be bestowed upon the male character out of logical necessity. She is the “object” in an obvious sense, but her agency gets the best of the subject, the man who, by objectifying another, ultimately objectifies himself by giving into lust so categorically and unreservedly. Buñuel apparently stated at one point that the only profitable film analysis is psychoanalysis, an unsurprising assertion from the co-director of Un Chien Andalou and L’Âge d’Or. That Obscure Object of Desire is similarly surrealist, although couched in a narrative that cooperates fully with both psychoanalytic theory and gender theory (viz. Mulvey). Boring as it is to delve back into that whole circular discussion, we shall not. As for the film, one must appreciate its political background slowly overtaking the foreground: nationalistic and religious extremism to the point of terrorism making an eventual power play on the unsuspecting Subject/Object, too obsessed with “her” to notice his own imminent demise, and the same indeed with her.

Power play

Quickies, Vol. XXXI

The Double Life of Véronique (1991, dir. Krzysztof Kieslowski) – A film that continues to challenge and provoke. Struck this time around by the very immanent nature of Kieslowski’s transcendence. Zizek thinks Kieslowski finds “God” a cosmic sadist (to use C.S. Lewis’ term), a rather mean child who toys with his creation for his own entertainment. Then Zizek goes on to perform neo-Lacanian analysis of Kieslowski’s own life (not his person, mind you; his life history), which renders his film theory very theoretical indeed. To boil down this film to something so dismissively simple seems quite unfair. The filmmaker here certainly toys with the notion that the Divine may not be purely gracious, but Kieslowski seems rather to suggest that it’s humanity’s idols that are vacant of grace and sovereignty, not the Great Other Himself. So the film constructs false gods in order to tear them down. On the other hand, the film also ends on a distinctly terrestrial note. For being so transcendent in nature, Kieslowski is a man of the earth.

12 Monkeys (1995, dir. Terry Gilliam) – A wild ride, and one that deserves more than it typically gets. Having not seen a ton of feature-length adaptations of short films by different filmmakers, it’s probably not worth much to say that this is one of the best of that variety. Here, though, the colors, the lenses, the sets, the shots, and the music create something superbly surreal. What the film says about reality and sanity hearkens back to Gillian’s earlier Brazil, this time tapping into something more quintessentially “Nineties” in all of its end-of-the-millennium paranoia. Just when you think you’ve honed in on who the truly “insane” are, you’re thrown a curve ball. The crazy revolutionaries are too crazy really to be crazy. It may be the scientists, the professors, the intellectuals that are truly mad. Undoubtedly.

Somewhere (2010, dir. Sofia Coppola) – The grand prize at Venice? Unanimously voted? What else was showing at Venice? As Wife observed, this film reminds one of Maeby’s classic line in Arrested Development when it’s inadvertently suggested that she end a film with two characters walking across the ocean: “No, deep is good. People are going to say, ‘What the hell just happened? I better say I like it,’ because nobody wants to seem stupid.” Being one of those who appreciated Lost In Translation and even Marie Antoinette, perhaps we can state with some degree of credit that Somewhere seems to go out of its way to be “arthouse,” begging even lovers of Terrence Malick and Wes Anderson to use the big “P” word (pretentious) in describing Sofia’s latest. Yes, it’s wandering, fluid, elusive, exploratory; and not explanatory, straightforward, or all that structured. The point being made is not a difficult one, but the film presents it as difficult. This is essentially the definition of the “P” word.

Akira (1988, dir. Katsuhiro Otomo) – Animated dystopia at its best, probably, but who watches much of it? Seems like such a time warp into the 80s, not to mention a space warp into Japan. Put those two together and you get something so huge and ideologically influential (not to mention aesthetically) that there are probably countless dissertations out there on the subject. The myth at the narrative’s center is easily the most interesting aspect of the film. After years of waiting for their god to resurrect, they stumble into the definitively postmodern fact that god is dead and guys with money have just been perpetuating the image of his existence for all this time.

Fanboys (2009, dir. Kyle Newman) – By geeks, for geeks, via geeks. A flatly objective satire on Star Wars followers would have equated them, ultimately, with Star Trek nerds. Instead, Fanboys, despite utilizing William Shatner himself, shamelessly betrays its preference for all things Lucas. This makes the project all the more endearing, and is probably exactly what led Shatner to agree to it (recall his infamous SNL rant). Those behind and in front of the camera are perfectly tuned into the confused sexuality of these tools, which not only disarms the films critics but gives the film’s social awkwardness that special ingredient of self-consciousness.

Galaxy Quest (1999, dir. Dean Parisot) – Actually watched this one the night before the aforementioned. As a former Trekker/Trekkie/whatever-they-want-to-be-called-these-days, Galaxy Quest really is the Star Trek equivalent of Fanboys. It is the equivalent in the sense that Trek people really are a more social crowd: gathering at conventions and submerging themselves in team heroism, too busy to flip their noses at Star Wars people. (Arguably, they know that Roddenberry could no more take down Lucas than the Gorn could take down Kirk.) Made for an older crowd than Fanboys, Galaxy Quest is a bit more laid back and takes even its satire less seriously than the former.

Quickies, Vol. XXX

The Stranger (1946, dir. Orson Welles) – Deserves more space, obviously. Suffice it to say, Welles’ camera rewards the viewer’s careful attention. Every movement is so deliberate, and the long takes don’t draw attention to themselves as a result of competence in front of and behind the lens. This would be great for a study of spaces and eras. Wartime Germany –> postwar Americana. Small-town rural: the soda joint, the church, the trail through the woods.

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (2011, dir. Rob Marshall) – Yeah, rough. Hadn’t seen the previous one and had only seen the one before that once. Thanks to Twitter, was expecting it to suck, and it came through. Something actually a little interesting was suggested by the vicious, bloodsucking, vampire mermaids, but of course it descended into a Twilight-esque melodrama. Depp: get back to hanging out with Jarmusch, or even Burton, for that matter.

Rango (2011, dir. Gore Verbinski) – It’s been awhile now, but this seemed like one of the better, more unique examples of animated fare of the last few years. Unlike a lot of stuff, which is made both for kids and adults, this one is made for kids and cinephiles. Plenty of allusions to the classics, particularly Westerns. And it sticks pretty well to the man-with-no-name formula, in the sense that Rango doesn’t have much of a past and we only know his self-invented name. Also, a shout out to some of the most impressive animation one’s gonna see these days.

The Outlaw (1943, dir. Howard Hughes & Howard Hawks) – Other than existing to ignore censors and exploit Jane Russell’s assets, The Outlaw has the feel of a B-movie from its acting to its absence of substance to its poor camera work to its striking lack of cleverness. Still, it stands as yet another testament to the mythos of the American West, a kind of revisionist history that puts Doc Holliday, Billy the Kid, and Pat Garrett in the same story and imagining a different ending to the generally accepted historical one. The characters don’t have the edge that later Westerns do, instead glorifying the “outlaws” and vilifying the sheriff. Doc and Billy are sweeties; innocents, really. Gay stuff is everywhere, of course, even with a woman like Russell cast aside by comparing her regularly with a horse.