Funny and all over the place

Woody Allen’s neurotic ramblings on despair, film, women and finding meaning in it all is bound to lead to funny material. He’s too sharp and his commentary too biting to make life, and its moments where we’re powerless and so lacking in control, seem like the regular old mundane. He tries to turn these ideas into coherent scripts and doesn’t always succeed. “Stardust Memories” is proof of that; it plays like a collection of moments and surreal dreams that are frustrating to put together yet the film does have the same Allen insights.

He plays a film director named Sandy Bates, someone who most people say used to be very funny before he started worrying about worrying. He now looks at art as an outlet for his and the world’s suffering and many film executives don’t like it. His latest film is pretentious and unsalvageable and no one wants to hear about it or Sandy quoting the New York Times piece he just read about how we’re all decaying matter.

Bates has been invited to a weekend film seminar, where people very much like himself sit in attendance and ask questions about the meaning of everything in his films. A wife asks her husband, “What do you think the Rolls Royce was supposed to symbolize?”, to which he replies “I believe it’s supposed to represent his car.”

During the weekend the fans come as all kinds, from people who want to write psychiatric papers on his work, to female groupies who show up in his hotel room bed unannounced, and people who want to pitch his comedy scripts about something terrible happening in Guyana. They hound him for autographs constantly and come across as sycophantic vultures whose abnormalness is given normalcy by Bates’ work.


But Allen doesn’t stop there. He also seems to be imagining times from childhood, or recollecting in flashback his time with an equally neurotic actress named Dorrie (Charlotte Rampling), or getting so carried away in his emotions that he visualizes his anger becoming a living-breathing thing going on a killing spree, or at points seemingly being in a living dream, or at one point even asking space aliens what he should be doing in life.

It gets equally fantastical as well as ponderous and it’s hard to really say for sure that these dream elements help illustrate the point he’s trying to make. Even in an area where he usually excels, women, he comes up empty. Thanks to Rampling, Dorrie at least has an inner pain we connect with but Allen is too concerned with the inner turmoil of people here to really find the initial love connection between these two. So later when he sees something he likes in a woman named Daisy (Jessica Harper) who reminds him of what he liked about Dorrie, we then have no idea what the hook is for two relationships in this movie. Then there is his current French girlfriend (Marie-Christine Barrault), who he wants to move in with though he’s not sure about her children. This segment is given short shrift too and by the end we just don’t care and Allen doesn’t really seem to either.

Ironically Allen is always more fun when he’s gloom and doom, when he’s waxing about existential philosophy (he got 100 on a test by never answering a single questions), and when he’s chastising studio executives for wanting asinine sitcoms when he’s trying to make art. But it seems like Bates is past the point of art as well and has now just become enveloped by human suffering, and that’s where the film frustrates most as it keeps bringing up things to bitch about, but doesn’t have one particular focus.


The overarching idea here is to make something akin to Fellini’s “81/2”, which this film is a homage to. That's another film about a director being pulled this way and that by fans, women, and movie people. Allen even shoots the film in black and white and begins the film with his own version of the railway car, where he believes he’s trapped on the wrong train while the party car across the way is just leaving the station.

The rest can basically be described as no party for Sandy, who bemoans his place in life and why he’s not doing more to help humanity, or doing better, or finding the right woman, or why he can’t help his struggling sister, or that he’s worshipped by fans for what he sees as nothing. This is Woody Allen in a nutshell, and some of it is even funny, but it just feels as though a scattering rather than organized whole.