4 - g ARTS ___ I9og 6 Sunday, November 2, 1980 The Michigan Daily 7oody s latest: An unsensual ob session By OWEN GLEIBERMAN Over the last decade, Woody Allen, has created a public image that spilled over into his movies, transforming his mealy mug into America's neurotic national monument. By now, it's not worth making distinctions between his ov- and off-screen personalities; they've merged into a single, mythic identity. Allen's Jewish narcissism may leave him open to charges of self- inidulgence, but without it, Annie Hall and Manhattan wouldn't have that strong identityibackbone. Like Philip SHOWCASE The U-M Department of Roth, he's probably at his most honest and compelling when he's most self- absorbed. Even Woody Allen's peculiarly self- centered brand of quasi- autobiographical moviemaking makes one rigorous demand on the ego in- volved: that he be true to his deepest instincts. Annie Hall was a love-poem from the heart-asincere sentimentality. In Stardust Memories, Allen tries to turn his sentimental heart to stone, but his cynicism is a conceit. He's taking the wildest, most elaborate ego-trip of his career, yet the-movie never really holds you because Allen is no longer playing with his real obsessions. Wat- ching him toss various self-images around may be fascinating and even satisfying to some Woody Allen fans, who tend to be enraptured by anything he does, but then so might a manilla folder of xeroxed interviews with Allen. ° Stardust Memories isn't boring, but it's a film you "read" rather than enjoy. YOU'D THINK that after nearly a quarter-century in psychoanalysis, Woody Allen could stop using other people's supposed misery as the ex- planation for his own unhappiness. His best comedy takes off from crazy, per- sonal details. But when Woody Allen gets serious, he's an encyclopedia of abstrations. Death, God, the Suffering of the Masses-it's all so blandly universal he might as well be quoting Budhust scriptures. In Stardust Memories, Allen stumbles on to a new abstraction: His audience. And it's by putting his audience in abstract ter- ms-seeing them as a physically ugly, vulgar, philistine horde-that he can I, Theore and Drama presents: Alan Ayckbourn's MANNES Nov. 58 8pm Tickets at the Professional Theatre Program Michigan League 764-0450 A LL SEATS KIDS AIE INDIVIDUAL THEATRES $15"w.w AIE 25th Ave. of Liberty 761-9700 I_ BOY(G) 1 Trueblood In the Frieze Theatre e Building SAT, SUN AT 1:00$& 3:00 44 _ _ __ i6t. ko 4 1 ~, let his contempt loose. That tiresome death-fixation of his has always been a subtle form of contempt anyway-a bit of intellectual one-upmanship aimed at the vast majority of his audience, whom Allen knows only too well don't fret away their days contemplating such cosmic questions. Now, Allen cuts through to the seeds of his contempt with a grossly self-pitying audience- rejection fantasy. Allen stars as Sandy Bates, a famous comic director who wanto to make serious, important movies. Throughout the picture, he's hounded by nattering production assistants trying to com- mercialize his work, and by his adoring followers, who converge on him in a cretinous swarm. Autograph freaks, comic-obscure charity organizers, spaced-out groupies, knowing film critics, would-be screenwriters and ac- tors, and assorted hangers-on all strain for their moment next to the Star. "We love you," they keep telling him. Allen's patented horn-rimmed grimace tells us the feeling is anything but Mtutual. The kicker, of course, is that Allen in- tends all of this to be big news. After a decade of audience-pleasing comedies, he's trying to fmake good on the old cliche about a comedian's hostility toward his audience. He's stabbing them in the back. Throughout, Allen. cleverly conceals himself from coun- terattacks. He's thought of every con- ceivable criticism one could make of Woody Allen-his career, his image, his movies-and planted them in the mouths of dodo characters, as if to say, "See, I already know your com- plaint-it couldn't be valid." The same ploy was pulled in the oppressively macabre Interiors-a character spoke of how pessimism in art was the latest trendy rage-but half of Stardust Memories is taken up by self-defensive maneuvers. Allen justifies his misan- thropy by demonstrating that he's his own best critic. THE OPENING is a paradigm of Allen's method. It's a super-obvious Fellini spin-off, with plaintive, gum- jawed grotesques surrounding Woody Allen on a creaky train. The scene in- tentionally recalls Marcello Mastrion- ni's suffocating entrapment at the start of Fellini's 8%. But Allen doesn't merely leave himself open to the charge of being derivative; the entire sequence is set up to invite such ac- cusations. The catch is that in a few MANN THEATRES mIILGfAGE 4 375 N. MAPLE 769-1300 Daily Discount Matinee k -I" SYMPHONY CONCERT AT ~ STUDENT PRICES' The Ann Arbor Chamber Orchestra JAY, NOVEMBER 2, at 3:00 PM at the MICHIGAN THEATRE Jessica Harper and Woody Allen in a scene from Allen's latest film, Stardust Memories, the heartrending story of how awful it is to be Woody Allen and have to put up with all the people who worship Allen movies like Stardust Memories. momentsr some scratchy leader flashes by, revealing that it's not "Stardust Memories" we've been wat- ching, but a clip from the film study Sandy Bates is making. Can this really be called self-parody? In a technical sense, yes, because the whole of Star- dust Memories turns out to be an imit- ation/homage to 81. But it's parody with a knowing, self-congratulatory grin, the sort of plastic risk-taking a celebrity indulges in not because he's sick of his image, but because he's begun to anticipate his detractors. Allen is so preoccupied with jolting home these messages about where he stands that he's dispensed with most of the formal continuities of a traditional narrative. Temporally speaking, Star- dust Memories' key inspiration might have been Last Year at Marienbad. The movie is a jumble of flashbacks, fan- tasies, and fancy crosscutting, with no real "present" and not much of a story. Allen was doubtlessly going for a free- form, collage effect, and the quick tan- stitions keep one from losing interest, but they shut out real emotional in- volvement, too: Stardust Memories has no seductive structural logic, no mood. The action does, at least, center around a single location-the Hotel Stardust, where a film critic is holding an exclusive weekend seminar on Sandy Bates' films, featuring the direc- tor himself. (This is, in fact, based on critic Judith Crist's notorious film seminars of.a few years ago, and Allen gets in some wickedly funny digs at Crist and her gushy-nincompoop school of movie, criticism.) Included are question-and-answer sessions with Sandy Bates, screenings of his movies, and close encounters with a variety- pack assortment of fans. One man begs him to donate a truss to a charity auc- tion; a woman in a tube-top requests that he sign her breast (he complies); a psychaitrist working on a definitive study of Sandy Bates' work wants to know if he has ever had intercourse with an animal. Essentially, these hotel guests are all variations on the shovel- faced cabbie who spotted Alvy Singer outside a movie theater in Annie Hall and began shouting his name down the i I featuring CSABA ONCZAY, Cello street. THE CLIPS from Sandy Bates' old films are intriguing-picture-perfect take-offs on the absurd/demented style Allen brought to a zenith in Bananas, Everything You Always, Wanted to Know About Sex, and What's Up, Tiger; Lily? But you can't laugh at them com- fortably, since one's easy response to the reckless humor is part of what0 Stardust Memories thumbs its nose at. Some of the movie's dramatic scenes are partial restagings of funny bits from Annie Hall and Manhattan, only here, they're intentionally less funny. Allen seems to dismiss the comedy for being too garishly obvious. He's saying how easy it is to laugh-how it's only the plebians who want to keep laughing. By lining up hysterical clips next to scenes in which he cynically bad- mouths comedy, he's not only defacating on his own past, but onW anyone in the audience who par- ticipated. This latent hostility to humor is presented as a protest against those who (in films or life) would shut out "reality." But Woody Allen doesn't seem very interested in reality in Star dust Memories. He pictures Sandy Bates in relationships with three dif- ferent women, but the scenes are static, spotty, undeveloped. Two of these women-Charlotte Rampling as Dori,°a neurotic, darkly sexy starlet, and Marie-Cristine Berrault as a serenely mature French earthL mother-suggest images of Woody Allen's idealized woman. (Both, significantly, drag down the relations ships out of their own emotional schiz- ziness.) But the goddess mystique is what's so crushingly limited. Allep's romances don't make any organic sen- se unless the woman he's involved with has a messily complicated set of quirks to complement the hero's compulsive Jewish-neurotic hang-ups. And this film has its de-glamorized Annie Hall in Jessica Harper, who plays a smart, frazzled orchestral violinist who ac- companies her film-teacher boyfriend to the seminar and forms a vaguely romantic liason with Sandy Bates. Harper, whose most notable previous performance was probably as the charming guileless Phoenix in Brian De Palma's Phantom of the Paradise, has dark, frizzy hair and a low-whiny voice (like Brooke Adams'),.and here she's playing the hero's real dreamboat. Like Diane Keaton in Manhattan, Harper is See STARDUST, Page 7 STUDENT TICKETS $5 and $4 Additional $1.00 discount with this adi RIi 41 Program Concerto for 'Cello-Haydn Concerto in G--Boccherini Ancient Airs and Dances-Respighi Tickets on sale at the Michigan Theatre today and Saturday, 2-6 p.m. Call 996-0066 for more information. zZ Ise PHiLIP GLASS ENSEMBLEi friday, november 7 8pm r ack ham auditoritumn Tickets $7.50 reserved .1 Tickets on sale now at The f . .ZfMichigan Union Box Office, o d q s -au Schoolkids' an ps )d .lIIe and at all CTC out- ir3nb 3 dS oU sua n 7ss3 lets.2For more information sa bs o . , ~su . n5u w I 'p; tI. call 763-2071. 9!9VANS 11.z 3!WA ou sI alJt4j -01 aI3 s V3 k~a05r- d I c1pnu a lt j suol a tU us do oU as sI a a s Paizuasj pa,, sp )ioM 4o j si eSsIysU a1 UOi lp a Pl >'!ii ^, d!iyd Philip Glass, the composer of two operas (one of which was performed to sold - a apeae-1U eueuc out houses at the Met) and a powerful influence on David Bowie, Brian Eno and a aL uo oloUI Dy,, ao sazayds L 1 Robert Fripp, combines classical elements, Javanese and Indian music, and lend of classical elements and electronic sound electronic amplification to.create important new music of mesmerizing product- ure s the thing, says Philip Glass tions. if J SEd S " l// d 1l S a lnionfS 3?1/ I r: I 0190 RONPiCTiM CowMAT ALLI1i*Td rSERl E -O } 1:30 3:30 5:30 7:30 9:30 1 1:15 3 15 7 30 U*^wd9:30 BENJAMIN ® 1:15 315 5:15 7:30 9:45 DOUBLE FEATURE Coast to Coast 3:00 6:00 9:50 I 1 James Murray for Drain Commissioner. * Former County Energy Co-ordinator " Former County Erosion Control Officer * B.S. in Public Administration Elect Murray aDemocrat Paid for by Murray for Drain Commissioner Bev Bader, Treas., Box 499, Whitmore Lake. 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