Midnight in Paris (Woody Allen, 2011)

The opening shots of Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris show the titular city from the perspective of a tourist, focusing on landmarks as tour groups walk and ride ferries around town. Occasionally, he spares brief glimpses of back alleys occupied by locals who know how to avoid the shuffling guests. Meanwhile, Allen lays French-flavored jazz, a Parisien take on American music, over such shots. He even literalizes the other part of the title by spreading the montage over the course of a day from sunrise to starless night, watching the blossom of the City of Light as dim interior lights grow into the full dazzle of Paris after dark. Despite the simplicity of Allen's static montage, he conveys a number of important ideas with the first moments: we do not see the Paris of those who live there but of tourists who visit it, and the sight of centuries-old landmarks looming over modern urban bustle shows the past mingling with the present.

That juxtaposition magnifies as Allen follows Gil (Owen Wilson), a successful hack screenwriter who looks to Paris for inspiration for his novel. Drunkenly wandering Paris one night while his fiancée (Rachel McAdams) dances with friends, Gil suddenly finds himself sucked into an old car after midnight, ending up amongst flappers, ex-pats and, most importantly, a host of legendary artists who dwelt in the city in the 1920s.

Hannah and Her Sisters

Poor Woody Allen. No matter how many classics he makes, so many will dismiss them as unfunny for not stacking up to the madcap absurdity as such early hits as Sleeper. What so many fail to understand, even among his supporters, is that Allen, though he came to prominence as a stand-up comic, is first and foremost a dramatist. The humor in his work typically comes from his neurosis, an incessant need to point out the flaws in real time and to obsess over them so much that the flaws seem trivial as he makes mountains out of molehills. He and his characters worry so much about the right thing to say that they end up revealing everything they seek to keep hidden, albeit in lofty, philosophical terms.

Such comedy overflows in Hannah and Her Sisters, a film with three major story arcs, all propelled by characters voicing their insecurities and doubts to the audience as they struggle to find some semblance of happiness in their lives. They let us in on their relationship woes, and their awkwardness around members of the opposite sex is funny because it is honest and not exaggerated past the point of believability. Voiceovers shift between typical narrations and internal monologues: in one marvelous scene, Allen's character, a hypochondriac, mulls over the news that a CT scan revealed a spot on his brain and slowly thinks himself into a panic.

Mickey (Allen) is Hannah's (Mia Farrow) ex-, though he's still on reasonable terms with both her and her new husband, Elliot (Michael Caine), whom Mickey likes because he too is under-confident. Hannah is the center of the film, not in the sense that she's the main character and she fuels the narrative but that she is the core about which the stories of others revolve.

Elliot, resentful of his wife's self-sufficiency and success -- she's an actress who just got excellent write-ups for her work in A Doll's House -- leads him to drift away, and soon he finds himself taken with Hannah's sister Lee (Barbara Hershey), who herself is in a failing relationship. Max von Sydow makes a memorable appearance as Lee's ex-, a reclusive artist who shut himself off from everything but Lee, which makes their breakup all the more painful. Caine's performance is surprisingly moving, considering he's engaging in an affair with his wife's sister because he resents how strong she is. He agonizes over how to end his marriage and wait a while before pursuing a real relationship with Lee, to the point of being incapable of thinking of anything else.

Hannah's other sister, Holly (Dianne Wiest) is everything that the level-headed Hannah is not: a recovering coke addict, she runs a catering company with her friend April (Carrie Fisher) while they both hope to land auditions for parts. Though they're friends, the two are always in competition with one another, especially when a smooth-talking, opera-loving guy meets them at a party and takes the two out on the town. She's fiscally reliant on Hannah, something her sister doesn't mind now that it's not going to disappear up Holly's nose but which Holly deeply regrets. Holly's constant failures have left her as neurotic and insular as any of Allen's characters, and she even mentions to Hannah that she, the person nicest to Holly, is the only one who can really make her feel bad about herself.

In contrast to these serious (though often funny) segments, Allen's Mickey provides chunks of comic relief. When that CT scan suggests that the hypochondriac may genuinely have a serious ailment, his internal conversations break into a frenzy, only for the doctors to confirm that nothing is wrong. Now, I often wonder why, in film, someone who loses his faith typically finds it restored after something terrible occurs, but Allen turns it on its head. Receiving miraculous news actually triggers an existential crisis, which leads him to seek religion even though he maintains there's no God. Hilariously, he attempts to convert to Catholicism and mentions their strong moral codes when at the start of the film he, the producer of a sketch comedy show, argues with Standards and Practices for wanting to air a bit about the child molestation charges brought against priests.

Allen practically pioneered the anti-rom-com with Annie Hall, that genre that seeks to actually display love honestly, which severely scales back the laughs to be had into the bitter, real sort that accompanies the pain of relationships. But there is a lighter note to Hannah and Her Sisters, one that might seem contrived in other films but fits naturally here because the characters grow organically. That's what makes Allen -- when he connects -- the most powerful writer in the industry. He can run from laughs to tears, absurdity to stone-faced drama so effortlessly within a single film

Before now, I'd rarely, if ever noticed, Allen's skill with a camera. Gentle tracking shots follow these characters as they pace slowly, mulling over their torment, and his Bergman worship is visible not only in his casting of von Sydow but in his static close-ups that ruminate over the actors' faces that perfectly match their internal dialogue. These shots add aesthetic warmth to this ultimately tender story, and Hannah and Her Sisters must surely rank as one of the director's finest efforts. It reminded me, as Duck Soup did Mickey, that there is something worth living for in this world, and it's art.

The Purple Rose of Cairo

A great deal of the reason that I love Woody Allen is that the man loves to feel down. Hell, how many other directors can so routinely refuse to give the audience what they want and keep his endings original almost every time? Imagine my surprise, then, when I popped The Purple Rose of Cairo and discovered a magical (and extremely underrated) gem. For a man who never seems to smile, Allen knows how good he has it, and what starts as his usual, depressing fare transforms into one of the all-time great love letters to cinema.

Appropriately for Allen, the film is set in the Great Depression. Cecilia (Mia Farrow) desperately clings to a job as a waitress and spends more time trying not to lose the gig than serve people. Her boss knows that in these times, he can fire anyone and have a replacement immediately, and he terrorizes his employees into complete servitude. Her home life is even worse: her abusive husband (Danny Aiello) lost his job and seems content to let Cecilia provide for him while he whiles away the time gambling, drinking and cavorting with friends. Often she speaks of leaving him, but even if she gets out of the house she never gets more than a few steps out the door before she returns.

So, like all those who hate their lot in life, Cecilia tries to escape it. She spends all her free time at the local cinema, where the same film plays for weeks. She enters a broken-down mess, but for an hour and a half she's on cloud nine. One film, The Purple Rose of Cairo, plays for weeks on end, and Cecilia watches it frequently. She sees it so many times that, during a scene in the film, dashing supporting character Tom Baxter suddenly looks towards the audience and speaks directly to her. Then, he steps out of the screen as if was always possible, and suddenly you know you're watching something special.

Tom (Jeff Daniels) tells Cecilia that he and the other characters must act out the same dull routines endlessly, but through constantly seeing her he fell in love, giving him the courage to break out of his celluloid prison. Tom acts just a like a movie character would: he's chivalric, intelligent, loving, and utterly clueless when it comes to the real world. A great deal of the film's comedy comes from this naïveté: Tom takes Cecilia to a high end restaurant, only to realize his stage money isn't real. So he and Cecilia make a run for it, only for him to leap in a car and be utterly bewildered when it doesn't start. "You need a key," Cecilia timidly whispers. "They always just go in the movies," Tom replies exasperated.

Meanwhile, the other characters on the screen must sit around and wait for Tom to return. Audiences heckle them for not getting on with the show, but Tom, supporting character that he may be, is instrumental to the plot. The patrons initially demand refunds, but some people filter in just to watch the spectacle of characters playing cards. Word gets back to Hollywood, and Gil Shepherd, the actor who portrayed Tom, travels to Jersey to ensure that his rogue character does not ruin his budding career.

Gil initially presents himself as your typical egomaniacal actor: he blames himself for his character escaping because he "played him so real." Then he too meets Cecilia and falls for her innocence and her love of film. It probably doesn't hurt that she's a big fan and thinks he could be the next big thing. So now she's involved in a love triangle (technically a quadrilateral, but the husband really only factors in when he tries to prevent her from leaving) with a man and his doppelganger. Jeff Daniels has to walk a fine line here, but he does a magnificent job of explore the comedic exaggerations of both his characters without letting them slip into two-dimensionality. In fact, the only downside of his performances is that they can overshadow Mia Farrow's work, which is stellar: she doesn't seem like the person who could pull off being a cinephile archetype, but watching her sit down in a theater crying about the way of the world, only to slowly break out into an ecstatic smile when the power of film hits her is a sight to behold.

Despite the whimsy and purity of the film, Allen does let his typical gloom slip in near the end, it only reminds us that the real romance of this rom-com is our relationship with movies. The majority of films about film take us behind the scenes, onto tumultuous sets and inside shady business dealings. But The Purple Rose of Cairo sits in the audience with us and reflects what true film lovers feel when the lights go down and the screen flickers to life. I have never seen a film that so proves the maxim that to see the greatest film, one need only stand at the front of the theater and look back at everyone's upturned faces.

Vicky Christina Barcelona

Something amazing happens about 20 minutes in Woody Allen's latest opus, Vicky Christina Barcelona. Without a major shift in tone, it subtly but suddenly ceases to be a pretentious summer romp and becomes something so much more. For the remaining 70 minutes, Allen subverts that small niche of films in which women go to Europe and find wild passion, creating a layered portrait that, though it does not stand on the level of his 70s masterpieces, nevertheless shows that Allen's got some fire in him still.

A narrator opens the film and describes the two titular characters: Vicky (Rebecca Hall) is a practical woman, engaged to a well-off but boring man named Doug (Chris Messina); Christina (Scarlett Johansson), on the other hand, is carefree and spontaneous. Vicky visits Barcelona to get her master's degree in Catalin identity, and Christina just tags along and tries to figure out what she wants from life. Both stay with Vicky's distant relative Judy (Patricia Clarkson) and her husband Mark (Kevin Dunn), a peripheral couple who will become significant later in the film.

One day Vicky and Christina attend an art exhibition, where they spot Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem), an artist rumored to have broken up with his wife after abusing her. They then go to a restaurant where Juan approaches and attempts to seduce them, and he even invites them to join him in Oviedo for the weekend. Vicky of course is having none of it, but Christina finds herself intrigued by Juan's mysteriousness and his boldness, so Vicky has to come along to "protect Christina from making a big mistake."

It's here that the film starts to evolve; these first 20 minutes consist of little more than pompous dialogue that sounds more like a series of soliloquies than human conversation. However, when Vicky and Christina reach Oviedo, suddenly the film comes alive; ironic, considering how somber it really is beneath its warm veneer.

Allen's films always deal with sexuality in frank, unique ways, and Vicky Christina Barcelona is no different; Christina goes back to Juan's room in Oviedo, but comes down with food poisoning before anything happens. To pass the time while Christina recovers, Vicky accompanies Juan around town, meeting his father and ending up in a small acoustic guitar concert. Overwhelmed by their sheer "European-ness" of it all, Vicky succumbs to her desires and sleeps with Juan.

Then things get a little complicated. Vicky's fiancé decides to come to Spain to get hitched, and Christina gets better and shacks up with Juan. Now guilt-ridden and more uncertain of her marriage than ever, Vicky buries her pain from both Doug and Christina, who doesn't know about her tryst with Antonio. Hall has been sadly under-praised for her work in the film, as she puts in a wonderfully understated performance.

Christina seems to find something to latch onto at last with Juan, who introduces her to his artistic friends around whom "she could hold her own." She takes up photography and seems to find happiness. Until Juan's ex-wife shows up that is. Juan receives a call that Maria Elena (Penélope Cruz) tried to kill herself and brings her back to his home to monitor her.Clearly unstable, Maria initially despises Christina and resents the fact that she's now a guest in her own home, but the three eventually form a close bond, looking to polyamorous sex for emotional stability. This ain't your average rom-com, that's for sure.

Cruz puts in her finest performance to date as Maria, moving through the film like a maelstrom, but tempers her moments of manic abandon with sympathetic calm, and it keeps her character grounded and fascinating. Maria mentions to Christina that something was always missing in her relationship, and Christina might be that missing link. In this bizarre threesome, each of the characters finds some happiness: Juan finally settles into his relationship, Maria stabilizes and Christina finally finds her direction in life. Meanwhile, Vicky smolders with longing and pain for such a connection.

This is all very moody and revealing, but Allen throws us for one final loop at the end. As he so often does with his characters' relationships, Allen slowly pulls them apart. When this first came out, I saw a number of reviews calling it a great summer picture, and I don't know what movie they watched. Allen uses his beautiful backdrops and his superb cast (all of whom put in some of their best work, particularly Cruz, who certainly earned her Oscar nomination) to craft a tale of regret and loss. Not all films end with happy couples, but even when they end where they begin we are led to believe that these characters are at least bettered or more wizened by their experiences. Vicky Christina Barcelona offers no such reprieve; Allen wants us to know that, often, people can only ever be teased with happiness, and the knowledge that they'll never attain it hardly makes them better for the experience.