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Rating: "My most vivid memory tied to an old song on the radio takes me back to Aunt Bea and her boyfriend at the time, Chester, when they took me to the movies in New York. It was the first time I saw the Radio City Music Hall. And it was like entering paradise. I had never seen anything more beautiful in my life."
A handful of years lived through the memories of a child in 1940s New York, moments forever etched in little Joe's memory thanks to the emotions that only the mysterious allure of radio voices could bring him.
"Radio Days" is one of Allen's greatest works not only of the '80s but of his entire immense oeuvre, a different kind of comedy, with melancholic tones, occasionally moving, an intimate and touching portrait of a piece of American cultural history that no longer exists. "The Days of Radio" are those of little Joe (Seth Green) and his beautiful family; for the first time, Allen does not desecrate family reality but builds a happy realm for the little protagonist inhabited by reassuring figures, Aunt Bea (Dianne Wiest) with her ordinary tales of loves that never took off, the mother (a brilliant Julie Kavner), the father (Michael Tucker), and all the other relatives who crowd the suburban house where they all live together. The film is thus a portrait of a humble way of living, an almost biography of the director's youthful years; indeed, Joe can be considered Allen’s alter ego, engaged only as Joe's adult narrating voice, but it is also a melancholic fresco of a world that has now disappeared, made up of stars more or less bright and their stories. This part of the plot that unveils the real and human side of the radio world is lived through the story of Sally (Mia Farrow), a cigarette girl in a nightclub trying to make it as a singer who instead finds herself singing in an advert for a laxative.
Throughout the film, Allen plays on the opposition of the two realities; for Joe's family, the voices on the radio are doing well and they have the sweet illusion that life is happy and perfect for them, for Sally and all the others, living in fiction and appearance is terribly painful. The film is masterfully directed by Allen, who avails himself of Carlo Di Palma’s splendid cinematography and expensive sets, directs a choral film giving all the protagonists the right space, placing them in their small moments of life; an intense and nostalgic film, a little more than eighty minutes of great cinema.
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