*** (out of ****)
Starring Woody Allen, Charlotte Rampling, Jessica Harper, Marie-Christine Barrault, Tony Roberts, Judith Crist, Daniel Stern, and Sharon Stone.
Directed & written by Woody Allen.
1980 PG
Woody Allen’s “Stardust Memories” is a two-headed beast. On its very thin surface it is the story of a filmmaker in crisis. Beneath this story is a heap of self-indulgent, semi-autobiographical filmmaking, told in the kind of stark black-and-white images Calvin Klein commercials used to use. The only reason we tolerate this kind of thing is because “Stardust Memories” is at the same time a parody of this kind of indulgence. “Stardust Memories” has the appearance of being so autobiographical and so personal as to be meaningless to anyone besides Allen himself, but at the same time is a mockery of that style of filmmaking.
The surface story is that of an enormously successful comic filmmaker named Sandy Bates (Allen). Bates is a typical Allen protagonist, with self-deprecating speech patterns, sentences that all begin with apologies, and a limitless supply of jittery hand motions. As a filmmaker Bates has gone astray, grown impotent and trapped within himself and his inadequacies. His latest film isn’t funny, it isn’t even trying to be funny, and his studio executives are threatening to re-edit the movie’s ending. Thus mired Bates finds himself attending a retrospective of his own films, held at a vast seaside hotel known as the Stardust.
Amidst an endless onslaught of sycophants and admirers, whose vapid questions Bates does not hesitate to answer flippantly, we see the story of his relationships with three different women, all of whom have neuroses of their own that do not always gel with his. His one-time live-in love (Charlotte Rampling) battles self-obsession and anorexia; then there’s the French mother of two (Marie-Christine Barrault), a former socialist activist now in search of a divorce; and now there’s the imbalanced violinist (Jessica Harper) Bates meets at the festival. Bates, in the meantime, grapples with being a funnyman trapped in a world of darkness and suffering.
The story is generic Allen, or, more accurately, the typical trappings of an Allen film from about 1975 to 1985. There is psychobabble aplenty, everyone is amazingly well-read, and infidelity, while never bringing any real joy, is a popular pastime. “Stardust Memories” is also filled with Allen’s typical people: well-educated, affluent, wishy-washy, selfish, a little amoral. Dante would put them just outside the First Level of the Inferno. Although Allen is affectionate towards them he decries their moral inadequacies and how useless their learning and arrogance is in bringing them happiness; he never gives them quite what they want because they don’t deserve it. As for the sycophants that swarm at Bates’ feet, Allen shoots them as grotesques, with enormous glasses and bulbous chins, warped in a wide-angle lens.
The nonlinear arrangement of Bates’ three loves is meshed with the film festival as well as his own movies. Any given scene is liable to transform into footage on display at the festival. There are also a series of hallucinations along the way, involving death and God and aliens, giving us insights into the minds of Allen and his creation Bates. The result of Allen’s endeavors in “Stardust Memories” is more an intriguing exercise in style than groundbreaking character development or making any particular point; it is more interested in the telling than in the story. At quick-paced eighty-eight minutes, “Stardust Memories” is the perfect length for this kind of light-hearted experimentation. It’s tempting to ply the film for deeper meanings, but I’m reminded of the two critics at the film’s end, remarking on Bates’ most recent movie.
First critic: “What do you think his Rolls-Royce represents?”
Second critic (dead serious): “I think it represents his car.”
I certainly don’t want to come across as one of them.
Finished May 2, 2002.
Copyright 2002 Friday & Saturday Night