Allen: Stardust Memories (1980)

By Woody Allen’s own reckoning, Stardust Memories is one of his greatest films, and there’s no doubt that it holds a special place in his filmography. Released in the aftermath of Manhattan, it features Allen as Sandy Bates, a director who has made a transition from comedies to dramas, and is attending a press conference at the Stardust Hotel to explain his recent work, which has tended in an even more experimental direction. We get a glimpse of this work in the opening scene of the film, which has to be the quietest five minutes of any Allen scene before or since, to the extent that it almost feels like an exercise in how Allen might feel without dialogue, or reduced to a totally solipsistic interior monologue, in a paean to silent cinema that paves the way for Shadows and Fog a decade later. Admittedly, following that momentous opening – which features Sharon Stone’s screen debut – the film does return to the world of sound, but while there may be a script, there is rarely dialogue, with Allen’s monologic tendencies taken to such an extreme that he’s left totally isolated with his own voice as Sandy’s present starts to bleed into his past lives and loves, as well as his cinematic fantasies. Rarely is there more than one speaker in the frame – it’s one of Allen’s most innovative films formally – as we’re led through a series of weird, disjointed, surreal spaces that feel like projections of a voice that’s been left on its own for too long, echo chambers that seem to tactically ignore anyone else positioned or pontificating within them. While the adoring crowd that surrounds Sandy might be narcissistic in another film, here it simply serves to contour the surreal sense of utter insulation, alienation and annihilation that removes Allen from his fans, and it’s ironic that for a film that’s quite transparently about Allen alienating his comic following, alienation is already a given, a fait accompli. In his other films, that’s sometimes mitigated momentarily by romance, but here the romances tend to occur in fast-motion, to the point where it’s like watching a succession of Allen films sped up, with a new woman rotating in every couple of scenes or so, their features blurring between his slimy touch, as his fantasies – and his fantasies of women -  are condensed and contracted to such a pitch of perversion that they give the film an offbeat feel almost despite itself. Apparently, Allen frequently referred to this film as his tribute to 8 ½, and it makes sense, since in both cases we’re presented with a director taking their grotesque conceptions of women to their logical conclusion. Most of the time, you’d say that at least Fellini knew how to do that with visual panache, but what makes Stardust Memories so incredible is that it is one of the most visually innovative and genuinely experimental films of Allen’s often overegged arthouse catalogue, thanks in no small part to Gordon Willis, who puts in arguably his greatest contribution to an Allen film across this beautiful frames, in a cinematographer's paradise. Over and over again, Willis takes the sense of epic scale that he brought to Manhattan and reapplies it to Long Island, upstate New York and all a host of other sleep exurban locations – empty boardwalks, cars poised on the sides of road, massive beaches – building a classically cinematic sense of isolation, a vast celluloid wasteland that Allen wanders from frame to frame. Watching it makes you realise that, for all its affection, Willis and Allen’s Manhattan was ultimately a series of emptinesses – beautifully contoured and curated emptinesses but emptinesses nonetheless – that are here stripped of their contours, which makes them feel more expansive and existential, but also emptier at the same time, as if the fractured narrative of Manhattan were finally spun out over a black-and-white wasteland and Allen were condemned to try and glimpse himself amongst the pieces. As that might suggest, the film is often driven by its cuts, continually propelling us to some new showcase for Willis’ pregnant, poised mise-en-scenes while always deferring the question of whether the new image in front of our eyes is or isn’t a sequence from Sandy’s film, let alone a projected or imagined sequence from one of his fantasy films, the films his fanbase will never permit him to create. As a result, those cuts are where it also indubitably feels like Willis’ film, even if they consummate the manic absurdity of Allen’s beloved jazz score more than any film of his before or since, most beautifully in a scene in which one his most familiar refrains accompanies an alien invasion of a hippie gathering in the Hamptons. One of the most artificial, but least theatrical, of Allen’s films – which is saying something for his arthouse oeuvre – it ends up offering the same kind of unfettered access to his charisma that you get in his stand-up, his writing and some of his earliest and most amateur films, albeit a new kind of access that takes his narcissism to his limit and moves beyond it to exquisite, lyrical and quitre uncharacteristic “small moments of contact” that gather especially around his ex-lover Dorrie, played by Charlotte Rampling in one of her most mercurial and understated roles. The result is that rare thing – a Woody Allen film that manages to be intellectual, self-referential and even masturbatory without succumbing to the self-pity that seems almost synonymous with his arthouse career, leaving you genuinely convinced, for once, that we’re dealing a man who’s not sleazy or slimy but “just floundering around…ridiculous maybe, but searching.”