Everyone is cheerful, confused and unhappy in their own way – Weekend
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“The Great Irony”, filmed in France, in French, with French money, with French-speaking stars, tells the same story as all 49 of Woody Allen’s previous films: about love, crime, punishment, fate and a sense of humor, with with which the Universe deals with us humans. And it’s a wonderful movie.
Charming Fanny runs into her former classmate Alain on the street, who was secretly in love with her at school. He, a clumsy handsome man, turns out to be writing a novel about jazz, living in an attic and, most importantly, still cannot forget her. How cute! But Fanny is happily married – her husband Jean is rich, charming, loves his wife, hunting and fishing and really does not like those who interfere with him. His former business partner is said to have disappeared without a trace. Fanny’s mother, a connoisseur of foie gras and detective stories, believes that her daughter is very lucky in life.
A light—flying—and bitter parody of not a rom-com or a thriller (although “The Great Irony” has plenty of both), but of life. Woody Allen releases films year after year in which he talks about the strangeness of love, about dreams and reality, about plans and accidents that mock us. About the confusion with which we accept everything that falls and falls on our heads. About cities and people, about books and jazz, about rivers and leaves.
Here we go again.
It is stupid to accuse him of repeating himself: he does not repeat himself, but remains himself. With Allen’s trademark ironic resignation, he looks at how people destroy their own lives, but lives are still not destroyed.
“The Great Irony” is a direct successor to Allen’s great perplexed thrillers, “Match Point” and “Crimes and Misdemeanors.” One can perceive The Great Irony as another exercise on the same theme, another novel by a graphomaniac who has just arrived in Paris, in which it is about “fate, about fate.”
But there is something in this film that makes it impossible to turn away from it. Not only the ease with which 87-year-old Allen drives the plot to a cruel, clear and obvious ending, not only Herbie Hancock’s “Cantaloupe Island”, under which even love is not scary, not only the most charming characters – honestly, they are all the nicest people, like this is usually the case with Allen – not only the work of the great cinematographer Vittorio Storaro (Last Tango in Paris, The Conformist, Apocalypse Now). The endless Parisian autumn, the shining autumn of the suburbs turns into living pictures, full of light, color and obedient human figures.
Allen, who admits that he does not understand French, has created the ideal French cinema: a love drama that turns into a detective story, into a thriller, into an anti-bourgeois statement, into a parody of a love drama. The actors enjoy every gesture. The mother-in-law (Valerie Lemercier, “Aliens” by Jean-Marie Poiret, “Love Lives for Three Years” by Frederic Beigbeder, “Friday Evening” by Claire Denis) selflessly plays detective. Fanny (Lou de Laage played Kitty in the mini-series “Anna Karenina” by Christian Duguay) no less selflessly maintains the degree of charm – both when she reads poetry to a school friend and when she kisses her jealous husband. Her lover is played by Nils Schneider – the long side of Xavier Dolan’s imaginary love triangle in Imaginary Love and the shorter side in Emmanuel Mouret’s romantic exercise What We Say, What We Do. He’s awkward here, not all that charming, and trying his best to look like a New York intellectual. Actually, his hero’s name is Alain – it is unlikely that such a coincidence of names is accidental. Finally, Melville Poupaud, who played in his time with most French classics, from Ozone to Eric Rohmer, is good-naturedly disgusting here, a real king: “Now your soul is my concern,” he says to his beautiful wife. But more often you just stand by a giant model railroad and watch the train go along the rails, go through the tunnels, and emerge from the darkness. He’s in charge of the thriller here.
It feels like all these heroes came here from different genres, from different stories, and they each act based on the laws of their own genre. Allen collides them perfectly, sends them into the darkness, floods them with light, draws the plans of fate – and cancels them.
Of course, here, as always, Allen is ironizing (and really, just mocking) the bourgeois world, where everyone talks only about food, money and aliens, where no one can understand how the rich made their capital, and where lottery tickets never work. But he is ironic both at bohemian life and at Simenon’s middle-aged lovers – in essence, he looks at his heroes from the point where it doesn’t matter who you quote, Mallarmé, Anna Karenina or the menu of a new restaurant. Fate doesn’t understand words.
Allen himself says that this is just a crime film, a story of crime and punishment, and a little love. He admits that he sees Paris, one of the most important cities to him, “through rose-colored glasses,” but that, for him, is the point of the film—he wanted to take a light, charming story and turn it into a murder thriller.
In The Great Irony, everyone is serene. Fanny, who ended her first, bohemian marriage with a drug addict, easily moved into the second, with a sociopathic narcissist, and is going to think only about love – because in women’s novels everything is driven by love. Jean, a narcissistic sociopath, would rather look at his railway and call the thugs he knows than turn to a psychotherapist – in thrillers, after all, all problems are solved with the help of thugs. Only his mother-in-law is a little worried – it looks like his son-in-law is a murderer – but she is also sure that the police will figure everything out: in detective cases, the police quickly restore order. “The Great Irony” is a light-filled world of cheerful, simple-minded, sweet creatures. In its predictability, in its absurdity, in its defenseless belief that everyone will be rewarded according to their planning, “The Great Irony” turns out to be almost a hymn to today’s times, in which no one has the strength to reflect. Sociopaths hire cartoonish killers, girls in love get drunk and forget their lovers, wise mothers hope that the police will figure it out, deer wander through the forest, writers write sublime nonsense about how life is a farce, but whatever the heroes do is important to them – don’t think about how the world works, how chance turns into fate, how a train rolls along the rails as long as there is enough electricity.
To understand how questions of fate and chance work, it is probably important to know that Allen shot his film in France, partly because of problems with American distributors. That at the Venice Film Festival his film was shown out of competition and before the screening he was booed by activists, chanting: “No to rape culture!” That Woody Allen’s daughter Dylan Farrow accused him in 2014 of sexually assaulting him in 1992, and to distract her, he allegedly gave her her brother’s toy electric train. That Allen denied all accusations. That all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way.
In theaters from September 28
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