LAFF 2012: Woody Allen gives Rome (if not himself) some love
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Woody Allen stood up in front of a Los Angeles Film Festival audience and offered a glimpse into his self-flagellating mindset. Then he left the podium, and his movie pretty much did the same thing.
Unveiling his new Italy-set ensemble romantic comedy, ‘To Rome With Love,’ on the festival’s opening night at Regal Cinemas in downtown L.A., Allen told the audience -- perhaps only half-jokingly -- that he was very sensitive to criticism. ‘If you hate it and think it was a waste of time, don’t let me know. I get depressed easily,’ the 76-year-old Oscar winner told the crowd.
Allen’s English- and Italian-language film, which features countless shots of Rome bathed in a golden light, shows a set of parallel characters teetering on the brink of their own uncertainties.
INTERACTIVE: Films playing at the L.A. Film Festival
Jack (Jesse Eisenberg) uneasily contemplates an affair with his girlfriend’s best friend (Ellen Page). Young newlywed Antonio (Alessandro Tiberi) wrings his hands as he tries to avoid being caught in a series of lies with a brassy prostitute (Penelope Cruz). His wife Milly (Alessandra Mastronardi) self-consciously flirts with an unctuous movie star (Antonio Albanese) as she considers her own affair.
Allen himself even turns up, as a malcontented father of a young American woman marrying into an Italian family. He then questions himself and needles everyone around him -- particularly wife Phyllis (Judy Davis) -- in the manner of countless Allen characters before.
But perhaps no character betrays what Allen the director is thinking more than Leopoldo (Roberto Benigni), in a vignette that’s both a criticism of reality-TV fame and an exhumation of Allen’s own complicated relationship with celebrity. Perhaps the most boring man in all of Rome, Leopoldo leaves his house one morning to find himself besieged by paparazzi and talk-show hosts obsessing over details as mundane as his breakfast and shaving rituals.
Some of this satire seems clearly aimed at a Kim Kardashian famous-for-being-famous brand of celebrity. But Allen’s ambivalence about his own public profile is never far from the surface.
INTERACTIVE: Films playing at the L.A. Film Festival
Though it is as serious as a sprinkling of Parmesan -- the new user-friendly title, which replaced the more cryptic ‘Nero Fiddled’ and even more esoteric ‘Bop DeCameron,’ seems fitting -- the movie also distills seemingly every Allen preoccupation of the last three decades. Fidelity! Mortality! Sex! Celebrity! (On that last score, Allen does give the final word to a character who says that being a celebrity is ‘better’ than the alternative. And Allen did show up to LAFF, something he didn’t do for the Oscars in February.)
‘Rome’ hits theaters on June 22 courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics. Allen and the distributor of course last brought out the time-jumping ‘Midnight in Paris,’ the French stop on Allen’s global tour (he next shoots in San Francisco) and an Oscar-anointed blockbuster.
After that warm reception for ‘Paris,’ the early reviews of ‘Rome’ have, perhaps inevitably, been mixed, with some holding it up unfavorably to his 2011 best picture nominee.
Allen told the LAFF crowd, ‘I had a wonderful time making this picture in Rome. That does not mean you will enjoy it,’ perhaps alluding to those early reviews.
No matter the reaction, Allen shows little sign of letting up. At several points in the new film, Davis’ Phyllis tells Allen’s Jerry that he ‘equate[s] retirement with death. As Allen prepares to shoot his eighth (!) movie since turning 70, one gets the sense those words are close to the filmmaker’s heart.
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-- Steven Zeitchik
Interactive: Los Angeles Film Festival cheat sheet
