Sweet and Lowdown Woddy Allen's Cinema of Regret by Lloyd Michaels is a great book on Wod
One of my favorite ones, personally I admire a lot of characteristic of his movies that I consider unique in the genre.
First of all, lightness: protagonists in general are people who will be in grade to sorting out their problems; they tend to live the existence as if this one would be a continuous dance, so with rapidity, without thinking too much about the consequences of their actions, because, simply, life is in motion and it is indispendible not to lose any beat because is short.
Plus: there is always a high psychological component in Allen's movies. I had nightmares after that I watched Match Point, because, you simply know that the crime committed by Chris, the protagonist has been created with immense dishumanity for not lose the social status reached thanks to a wealthy marriage.
As you will remember the protagonist, Chris is just a tennis instructor at first then, thanks to a wealthy boy and friend attending his tennis lessons, is introduced in his family. There, Chris meet the sister of his friend, starting a relationship with her and later marrying her. He isn't exactly in love with her, but the wealthy position of the girl convince him without too many regrets.
Not only: along the way he meet the girlfriend of the brother of his wife; his girlfriend was simply attractive and they feel immediately a profound attraction; Nola at a certain point goes away, she break-up with the brother of Chris's wife, but later Chris will re-meet her and there they will start a relationship: in Chris's family problem is a pregnancy. The wife of Chris would want a baby, but it doesn't seem possible; Nola remains pregnant and that's the point! and reason why later Chris killed her without any kind of pietas. The amorality of this character can't be forgotten with simplicity. I don't think he felt any regret. He saved his apparently beautiful existence, hiding an extra-coniugal affair with various complications, but Chris remain a killer.
Sure, regret, the main thematic of this book doesn't seem to interest heavily his work. Not greatly.
Woody Allen during the six decades of his permanence in Hollywood has always been in grade of keeping more than fresh his movies, thanks to what was/is happening in the society and the mutations of love and its shades with the time.
There is no repetition in his movies but a lucid analysis of the existence of people and their personal turnmoil. Love stories born but die everyday as well, because simply happens, without complain too much but setting free under many ways the protagonist, moving on in a perennial state of beatitude, because the existence is wonderful and rich of opportunities.
In this sense it is wonderful Everyone Says I Love You, where the various protagonists will discover various kind of love, for later sorting out their heart's problems; they are also left alone; it is not a loss being abandoned by someone, because the protagonist return to perpetuate again his feelings for someone else.
Journalists, creative, thinkers, these ones the protagonists of Allen's movie, in Midnight in Paris the protagonist, Gil, a writer, with his fiancee Inez to Paris for a vacation will end up every midnight temporally in the Paris and The Left Bank of the 1920s, where he will meet Francis Scott Fitzgerals, Ernest Hemingway, Ella Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein and many more intellectuals of that time understanding that his life was anyway acceptably good in the present as well. Not only: also in this movie the couple won't survive, because Inez will cheat Gil with a lecturer at La Sorbonne but later the protagonist will meet a new girl, Parisian this time, with which, hopefully in grade to build a good existence. Sure, as he adds Michaels Midnight in Paris concludes affirming "Both the futility of looking back and the impossibility of not looking back."
Woody Allen's characters have a plenty life; they are in most cases intellectuals, they are rich, they don't have time for analyzing problems of the existence in profoundity; their erudition is important because it is part of the answer to all their problems; they have the certainty that they will always enjoy their existence; that's why they tend to live the moment, enjoying it, and when it is over, simply it is over, and they re-start to search for other new stories, novalties.
There is not any regret in living for example in Woody Allen's movies relationships with girls of 17 years. "His father is more young than me" will tell Allen in a line of his movie. But also in Vicky Christina Barcelona, we will see a sort of menage a trois, assisting also at the irrationality, instability of one of the characters.
Beautiful book, if you are a movie-lover, a fan of Woody Allen's movies, if you like introspection, if you search for movies that will let you think.
Highly recommended.
I thank Columbia University Press for the physical copy of this book.
Anna Maria Polidori
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