Stardust Memories (15.)
Directed by Woody Allen. 1980.
Starring Woody Allen, Charlotte Rampling, Jessica Harper, Marie-Christine Barrault, Tony Roberts. 85 mins. Black and white.
Stardust Memories was the first Woody Allen film that people hated on its release. Many of the fans that had followed him loyally through his comedies and his more ambitious and serious films, felt betrayed by this ugly portrait of fame and the problems of being trapped by the adulation of freakish looking fans. The observation that this freewheeling, surreal menage of fantasy sequences and flashbacks, centred around a film maker who suffers an existential crisis of confidence during a weekend retrospective of his films was inspired by Fellini 8½ is not going to win you any merit badges at film critic camp. The question is why did we love it when Fellini did it, and were repelled by Allen's effort?
Because unlike most of Allen's failures it isn't for lack of decent material. The film is full of great one liners and memorable moments. Everybody knows the moment where the inhabitants of the flying saucer say they like his earlier, funny films, and some of the gags have entered the Allen lexicon: “To you I'm an atheist, to God I'm the loyal opposition,” “you wanna help mankind, tell funnier jokes.” The catch though is that none of it is funny. By this stage Allen had been working in showbusiness for around three decades, he knew how to get the most out of a funny line. In Stardust though he is tripped up by over confidence or excess ambition.
His big screen career had been flying up to now and his previous films Annie Hall, Interiors and Manhattan had lifted him to probably undreamt of levels of acclaim. And those three, he didn't even think were that good.
In Stardust he puts enormous care into every shot. Everything is meticulously composed and it is all too much. There's not a casual moment in the film and it stifles the material. There is some great stuff here, and with a lighter touch it could have been one of his greatest films, but it comes to us draped in so much darkness and bitterness it is like a comedy routine performed in a mourning shroud.
The main issue people have with it is the contempt for his fans. Almost everybody who isn't one of the stars is shot at unflattering angles, and most of the supporting cast are made up of ugly or odd looking people. The main thrust of the film is a man who can never get a moment's peace. Film executives want to change the end of his latest film, autographs hunters harry him wherever he goes (though he does manage to sneak away unnoticed with somebody else's girlfriend.) Everybody wants something from him and the way the shots are framed, with his fans and sycophants looking straight into the camera, it is like the world to him is full of extras and bit part players whose whole existence is waiting for their big moment, the one line they get to deliver straight to camera, the moment they get to address him. And because the Bates character is so clearly autobiographical* it's hard not to take this portrayal of us as inadequate, bitter freaks personally.
Which is Stardust Memories biggest flaw: an excess of truth. It's the quality that we most value in an artist, but the one we are least likely to thank them for. Because this must be how fame looks from the inside, especially if you are a director, where your whole working life is people coming up to you with questions and demanding answers. This is his truth and he's giving it to us straight.
He's also seems to have a very clear understanding of audience's misgivings about him. At the start of the film some film executives accurately give voice to all the criticisms that have become the norm when discussing Allen: he's “self indulgent,” “not funny any more,” “pretentious, his filming style is too fancy. His insights are shallow and morbid. I've seen it all before, they try to document their private suffering and fob it off as art.” “What does he have to suffer about? Doesn't the man know he has the greatest gift, the gift of laughter?”
In a scene that is supposed to be from one of Bates's films we see the lead character's hostility escape from him, while he is sleeping and, in the shape of a big hairy monster, start to attack his family and friends. So there's no great subterfuge here. It may seem overblown and self pitying to us, but we're not living it. In one chilling moment Bates complains about his fans, “Today they love you, the next...” makes gun clicking noise – this just just months before John Lennon's assassination.
(Retrospectively, Allen may have wished he hadn't been quite so bold and honest in places. There's a very awkward moment where Rampling, appearing in flashbacks as his previous girlfriend, accuses him of flirting with her 13 year old niece over dinner.)
Later in his career, he got to make the same film twice. He did September with one cast, didn't like the results and redid it with a different cast. To be honest, the second effort was still pretty awful. This though, this is the one film it would've been great to see him do again, because it wouldn't have taken much work to make it great. Woody, stubborn as ever, rates it as one of his best, but to the rest of us it's his great, lost film.
*Arguably the most hilarious thing about the film is Allen's assertion that it is not autobiographic, and his bemusement that this tale about a film director who used to make funny films but is now trying to do something more serious, could be taken as being in any way related to him
Directed by Woody Allen. 1980.
Starring Woody Allen, Charlotte Rampling, Jessica Harper, Marie-Christine Barrault, Tony Roberts. 85 mins. Black and white.
Stardust Memories was the first Woody Allen film that people hated on its release. Many of the fans that had followed him loyally through his comedies and his more ambitious and serious films, felt betrayed by this ugly portrait of fame and the problems of being trapped by the adulation of freakish looking fans. The observation that this freewheeling, surreal menage of fantasy sequences and flashbacks, centred around a film maker who suffers an existential crisis of confidence during a weekend retrospective of his films was inspired by Fellini 8½ is not going to win you any merit badges at film critic camp. The question is why did we love it when Fellini did it, and were repelled by Allen's effort?
Because unlike most of Allen's failures it isn't for lack of decent material. The film is full of great one liners and memorable moments. Everybody knows the moment where the inhabitants of the flying saucer say they like his earlier, funny films, and some of the gags have entered the Allen lexicon: “To you I'm an atheist, to God I'm the loyal opposition,” “you wanna help mankind, tell funnier jokes.” The catch though is that none of it is funny. By this stage Allen had been working in showbusiness for around three decades, he knew how to get the most out of a funny line. In Stardust though he is tripped up by over confidence or excess ambition.
His big screen career had been flying up to now and his previous films Annie Hall, Interiors and Manhattan had lifted him to probably undreamt of levels of acclaim. And those three, he didn't even think were that good.
In Stardust he puts enormous care into every shot. Everything is meticulously composed and it is all too much. There's not a casual moment in the film and it stifles the material. There is some great stuff here, and with a lighter touch it could have been one of his greatest films, but it comes to us draped in so much darkness and bitterness it is like a comedy routine performed in a mourning shroud.
The main issue people have with it is the contempt for his fans. Almost everybody who isn't one of the stars is shot at unflattering angles, and most of the supporting cast are made up of ugly or odd looking people. The main thrust of the film is a man who can never get a moment's peace. Film executives want to change the end of his latest film, autographs hunters harry him wherever he goes (though he does manage to sneak away unnoticed with somebody else's girlfriend.) Everybody wants something from him and the way the shots are framed, with his fans and sycophants looking straight into the camera, it is like the world to him is full of extras and bit part players whose whole existence is waiting for their big moment, the one line they get to deliver straight to camera, the moment they get to address him. And because the Bates character is so clearly autobiographical* it's hard not to take this portrayal of us as inadequate, bitter freaks personally.
Which is Stardust Memories biggest flaw: an excess of truth. It's the quality that we most value in an artist, but the one we are least likely to thank them for. Because this must be how fame looks from the inside, especially if you are a director, where your whole working life is people coming up to you with questions and demanding answers. This is his truth and he's giving it to us straight.
He's also seems to have a very clear understanding of audience's misgivings about him. At the start of the film some film executives accurately give voice to all the criticisms that have become the norm when discussing Allen: he's “self indulgent,” “not funny any more,” “pretentious, his filming style is too fancy. His insights are shallow and morbid. I've seen it all before, they try to document their private suffering and fob it off as art.” “What does he have to suffer about? Doesn't the man know he has the greatest gift, the gift of laughter?”
In a scene that is supposed to be from one of Bates's films we see the lead character's hostility escape from him, while he is sleeping and, in the shape of a big hairy monster, start to attack his family and friends. So there's no great subterfuge here. It may seem overblown and self pitying to us, but we're not living it. In one chilling moment Bates complains about his fans, “Today they love you, the next...” makes gun clicking noise – this just just months before John Lennon's assassination.
(Retrospectively, Allen may have wished he hadn't been quite so bold and honest in places. There's a very awkward moment where Rampling, appearing in flashbacks as his previous girlfriend, accuses him of flirting with her 13 year old niece over dinner.)
Later in his career, he got to make the same film twice. He did September with one cast, didn't like the results and redid it with a different cast. To be honest, the second effort was still pretty awful. This though, this is the one film it would've been great to see him do again, because it wouldn't have taken much work to make it great. Woody, stubborn as ever, rates it as one of his best, but to the rest of us it's his great, lost film.
*Arguably the most hilarious thing about the film is Allen's assertion that it is not autobiographic, and his bemusement that this tale about a film director who used to make funny films but is now trying to do something more serious, could be taken as being in any way related to him
