Allen: Magic In The Moonlight (2014)

For over a decade now, Woody Allen’s films have been curiously devoid of any metaphysics of presence. Rarely exceeding the sum of their parts enough to feel like fully-fledged fictional films, they’ve also been too self-consciously stilted to feel like excercises in improvisational verite either. If anything, they’ve played as documentaries of famous actors reciting lines, perhaps explaining why they’ve come to feel so interchangeable with their casts, to the point where it feels as if Allen has been offering unusual casting juxtapositions and iterations more than actual films. In some ways, Magic in the Moonlight fulfils that mode more than any other Allen film of recent years – fulfils it so well, in fact, that it starts to gesture towards something beyond it. In essence, it’s Allen’s take on paranormal romance, inflected through a 1930s period piece that revolves around an acclaimed magician, played by Colin Firth, who sets out to debunk an up-and-coming spiritualist, played by Emma Stone, at the French Riviera resort where she’s spending the summer, and which is populated by a typical Allen ensemble cast that encompasses Eileen Atkins, Marcia Gay Harden, Hamish Linklater, Simon McBurney and Jacki Weaver. Although it’s peppered with Allen’s familiar repartee, great swathes of the film involve Firth scrutinising Stone and her spiritualist displays, on the watch for some kind of presence or atmosphere, anything that might belie something more metaphysical than Allen’s staid mise-en-scenes, which are peremptorily  and repeatedly dismissed as so much “theatrical fertiliser.” Building upon Blue Jasmine, Allen crafts some of his most pregnant reaction shots in years, as Stone’s visions extend to more and more people, stopping more and more people in their tracks with the apprehension of something quite alien to Allen’s late work, a breath of air so fresh it’s positively, oceanically occult. Perhaps that’s why the film also feels like a tribute to the Riviera road shoulders that populated so many sound stage of the 30s and 40s, clifftops where Allen almost seems to let go of his excoriating scepticism and misanthropy, where Firth himself seems content to parody his Darceyesque franchise and fanbase as never before, vantage points that are as refreshing as they are remarkable at this late stage in Allen’s late career.