Woody Allen
Everyone Says I Love you

In the vast production of Woody Allen, there's also room for musicals. With "Everyone Says I Love You" (1996), the bottomless well of ideas from New York ventures into a film with retro flavors mixed with a metropolitan and modern soul; a light and entertaining musical comedy very well held together in its various parts, and above all, Allen manages to make the most of a rich and very varied cast. He offers his audience a film that is a hymn to love in many of its forms, the rationally planned and artificial one, the adolescent one, the spontaneous and magical one.

A collection of life moments from a bourgeois family in New York, in which Allen is half the head of the household, the other man of the house married to his ex-wife, Goldie Hawn, is played by Alan Alda. Around them revolve all their children, who are themselves engaged in romantic escapades, from a young Natalie Portman to Drew Barrymore with her boyfriend Edward Norton, passing through the old grandfather who recently passed away, "Please, please, don’t start arguing in front of the grandfather, okay? He wasn’t an atheist, he wasn’t a republican, and he wasn’t even a democrat. Well, he must have been something, right? He was a foot fetishist."

Allen creates a musical that is partly a tribute to the old American tradition; the soundtrack is indeed composed entirely of old swing standards from the '30s and '40s, but it's also a bit of a parody of this way of making films where actors in the middle of a scene start singing (the scene where at the table Alda turns his talking into singing is beautiful, and immediately his wife asks: "Why are you singing now?") and dancing. The musical comedy is thus revisited in an ironic key thanks to many funny and successful moments (the character of Tim Roth, an ex-convict invited to Christmas lunch is a riot), and a bit of magic in computer graphics. Shot in three different cities that have always been among Allen's favorites: his New York, Paris, and Venice, it has a good rhythm and positively surprises in its overall lightness, although Allen always throws a jab or two; Alan Alda referring to God: "Even if He does exist, He’s done such a poor job that I’m amazed that people don’t all band together and sue Him.” Remaining in the realm of criticism and satire, the scene where a relieved Alan Alda discovers that his son's strong republican ideas were due to a clot that wasn't allowing blood to flow correctly to the brain is hilarious, a ruthless critique typical of Allen's best verve.

An interesting tidbit: the scene in which Allen magically lifts Hawn in the air during the dance was filmed in the same spot where the director set the dinner along the Seine with Peter Sellers in "What’s New Pussycat."