December 16, 2006
scoop
Woody Allen has made two movies (review of Match Point) in swift succession. Both are set in the posh Britain of London townhouses and country estates; both dwell, in ways both different and more egregious than his Manhattan movies, on real estate porn; both star Scarlett Johansson (who is herself swiftly turning into something akin to real estate porn).
More pointedly for the director whose work we most associate with his "personal life" (not because of his charismatic appeal, but because no one has — paradoxically — sacrificed more to be an auteur), both revolve around a low woman who threatens to bring down an ascendant British pretty boy from his aristocratic perch by exposing sexual indiscretions. In both cases he kills her. A little weird to make that movie twice in one year, hmm?
In the earlier film Johannson takes on the low woman role, a striving but ungifted American actress; in this version, though Scarlett again "plays" a base American forced to employ her non-existent acting skills (so that's weird), the low woman in question is a British prostitute we never see. Here the suave monster is played by suave monster™ Huge Ackman, more capable but somehow less persuasive for it than Scoop's appropriately overmastered Jonathan Rhys-Meyers). The repetition compulsion (the director's, not the actors' or characters') is so pungent that it's hard not to wonder what's up, and from a small distance it seems like Woody has merely remade the first film so as to write a role for himself — as a bumbling magician, no less, doing the same lame trick over and over on a rickety stage.
One wonders how many times Woody Allen can parlay such a minimal scenario into (apparently) releasable films in the short window available to him. He's always been a prince of nostalgia; here the act of nostalgia is in having to recollect (despite contemporary settings) the lost moment when the United State's unrefined, upstart vitalism was last a source of anxiety for Britain's still-regnant aristocratic class (1944? 1923? 1898?), rather than itself a vanishing fact. That lost era has replaced (the conspicuously absent) jazz as the anachronistic tell of the Konigsberg project; it must somehow count as strange that, at this moment, the director has replaced a long-standing cultural fantasy with an explicitly nationalist one.
Addendum: given Allen's stature in France, perhaps his new obsession with Britain's old panic over ceding world-hegemonic power to the US becomes a way of pandering to French audiences.
Posted by jane at December 16, 2006 08:32 AM | TrackBack