Word: stardusts
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WITH Annie Hall, Woody Allen created a film for anyone who calls the New York metropolitan area "home." With Manhattan, he recreated a hilariously familiar world for those who call that stubborn borough's East Side "home." But with Stardust Memories, he has made a film for that lone neurotic New Yorker who calls Woody Allen's apartment "home." It is cold, uninviting and spiteful, a brooding flipside to Fellini's 8 1/2, a masturbating-cousin to Fosse's All That Jazz. It is autobiographical, as all his films have been autobiographical, but Stardust Memories is repulsively self-conscious, full...
...this sounds like the hyperbole of extreme disappointment, of bitter frustration at the fall of a modern comic idol, it is. Stardust Memories may be funnier than one cares to admit but Allen's eighth film is certainly no comedy. It's not a tragedy either, or even a strangled drama like Interiors. It smells most like a farce, a self-pitying self-satire. It is so contemptuously intellectual that the jokes about intellectuals are not funny but ironic. "Intellectuals are like the Mafia: they only kill their own," Allen snaps, acknowledging his brand of artistic suicide. Allen was once...
...makes no apologies for this plotless venture to the Stardust Hotel (the name comes from a great Louis Armstrong tune), a seaside resort where a nebbishy but successful movie director renowned for his "early comedies" is lecturing at a film symposium. The film's transparent structure is almost non-existent; Stardust Memories begins aboard a commuter train to hell (a Staten Island grabage dump?) and ends under the twinkly lights of the hotel's screening room. Along the way Allen abandons coherence, chronology, and even comic timing. He jumps between love affairs, fantasies, and his distorted sense of reality...
Somewhere in Stardust Memories' first 20 minutes, Allen abandons any pretense of romantic comedy, venting his despair over the state of the world with no more than a hint of warmth or humor. He is angry that he feels compelled to wear dark glasses; in one fantastic episode, Allen chases his Hostility, which has escaped to ravage the countryside. The jokes are here, but Allen ignores them. He is too intent on baring his soul. Eager to make his audience uncomfortable, his distracted view of reality instead makes us feel unwanted...
Because Woody Allen, like Fellini, has an acute sense of the absurd, he can see as much humor in his own splintered isolation as he can in the clumsy attempts of outsiders to break into the cage, to crash the cocktail party inside his head. Stardust Memories is a schizoid invitation to that party. The card says: COME ONE, COME ALL. BRING YOUR OWN BOOS. And in a fine hand at the bottom you can read: TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT...