A successful director of comedies now interested in making "serious" films attends a festival retrospective of his work and finds himself besieged by cinema admirers and women from his past and present.
After a decade of increasingly-sophisticated comedies, culminating with his Oscar-winning classic Annie Hall, Woody Allen shocked audiences by making a serious chamber drama inspired by the works of icon Ingmar Bergman. While that film did receive many positive notices and its own award nominations, many felt Allen's experiment was pretentious and that he was better off sticking to comedy. Allen split the difference with his black & white dramedy Manhattan, which featured expressive images as well his usual odd cast of characters and pointed one-liners, and while this regained his good standing with the filmgoing public, Allen began the 1980's with another challenge in Stardust Memories: one of his most autobiographical films as well as one of his most surreal.
Ostensibly a comedy (with nods to the slapstick of Allen's earlier films), Stardust Memories opens with a dream sequence paying homage to Federico Fellini's classic 8 1/2, and is filled through its running time with abstract imagery as well as adventurous editing choices. The main plot device itself comes from Fellini's film, as well as a blurring of the line between subjective memory, the present reality, and fantasy. Thematically, Allen looks at the movie business as well as his typical romantic and philisophical musings. While the executives, groupies, critics, and family members are depicted with more than a hint of the grotesque, the filmmaker paints very tender portraits of the three very different women he's involved with over the course of the story.
The cast includes Allen himself, British actress Charlotte Rampling, French actress Marie-Christine Barrault, and Jessica Harper representing the Americans. The film also marks the return of frequent Allen collaborator Tony Roberts. The photography is by Gordon Willis, who in addition to shooting Allen's three previous films was behind some of the decade's most important works (including The Godfather films and All The President's Men). As usual, the soundtrack is made up of classic jazz recordings, including the one performed by Louis Armstrong that gives the film its title.
The critical reception to the film was harsh; many writers resenting the way that the audience was portrayed as a gallery of desperate, opportunistic, obsessive freaks, and the film only managed to take in as much as Interiors at the box office. Allen denied that the film was autobiographical, and while it is difficult to accept this defense, the reality has clearly been exaggerated for effect. Often maligned for years, this daring, inventive film does have numerous champions among Allen fans, and the director himself has cited this as one of his favorites of his works.
Running time is approx. 90 min.
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