Woody Allen
Stardust Memories

Undoubtedly the most Fellini-esque of Allen's films (alongside "Sweet and Lowdown"). It is a film "about" the film that ultimately reveals itself as a film "within" the film, following a scheme that, if not entirely novel, is nonetheless always executed at highly interesting stylistic levels and, given the acknowledged 'credits', also original. The whole is indeed masterfully seasoned with "Allen's style"; a style some find modestly insane, a few irrelevant, and thankfully, many find brilliant.

Strangely and unjustly considered serious and minor, "Stardust Memories" is a little gem, as are almost all of Allen's works that the director has chosen to grace with black and white—which is more of an embroidery than a gimmick—that Woody seems to have saved for his dearest, most intimate, seemingly small, and in some way, more touching works. Here, the Fellini influence is heavy in the use of the camera, in the close-ups of the classic "faces" (a style humorously mimicked by Arbore in FFSS at the time, yet no less "style", no less original, and no less inherently entertaining), as well as in a certain type of narrative structure that cuts the classic flow of the film with dreamlike, fantastic, or magical parentheses, perfectly inserted and congruent, despite an apparent and mad estrangement from the whole (the wonderful red child with glasses—the usual one—who suddenly raises his fist and flies away like Superman). But even the Fellini influence is, as I said, in Allen's own sauce. The jokes are his, the situations too, starting with the classic love entanglements and multiple, clandestine, and consecutive infatuations—a true classic repeated endlessly without ever creating boredom or sheer repetition. Here the eighties open up, and Woody is an apparently crisis-stricken director, autobiographically a slave to his early brilliant comedic films, which the audience wishes to see repeated ad nauseam when he feels he no longer has them within, demonstrating in fact, and brilliantly, the opposite. Yes, because Allen cannot help but offer the punchline spontaneously, in an absolutely natural manner: here, as always, the jokes flow one after the other, simply within a different framework from the usual, as they are inserted in a simultaneously cold and warm, dreamlike, and hyper-realistic photography.

An Allen brilliant and only seemingly sophisticated. The usual man with a different coat, or the usual painting with a different frame. But one cannot complain when the painting, or the man, is perfect. From then on, Woody Allen will change: purely and frankly comedic films will give way to more complex works, much more (and better) constructed, but equally comical at heart. The director is often accused of hyperproduction. The day, as far off as possible, when we will also be orphaned of him, it will be a hyperproduction that will be missed. In memory, however, the close-ups of Charlotte Rampling remain above all, with a beauty capable of overwhelming a man. Or, at least, me.