Inside the Current Issue

Far From Manhattan, Woody Allen Unbends
Film Review: Match Point: Directed by Woody Allen

Ajay Gehlawat

Scarlett Johansson and Woody Allen at Cannes

"If the four of us are walking home over the bridge and then there was a person drowning in the water, would we have the nerve, would one of us have the nerve to dive into the icy water and save the person from drowning?"

A Turing Test of sorts: without watching the opening credits (and even in this case, with Una furtiva lagrima rather than the usual jazz, it is the old, scratchy recording that makes it immediately identifiable, along with the standard font of the credits), one would not know Match Point was a Woody Allen film. Naturally there are moments, again generally relating to the use of music (i.e., non-diegetic), though not as many as usual, and even more specifically, music and editing (e.g., the abrupt cut from Mahler's 9th in Husbands and Wives - in that case, diegetic - to a conversation, in a different setting, between characters), that may give the viewer familiar with Allen's oeuvre an inkling of recognition. Yet even these moments - particularly without the benefit of the opening credits sequence - are not enough to conclusively determine the auteur.

A Turing Test, then: arriving just a minute after the film has begun - that is, at the film story's actual beginning (the presentation of the first images) - could one tell that this was a Woody Allen film? (One might put this latter phrase in quotes, so as to denote the series of connotations associated with it, e.g., Manhattan settings, cast of actors - the so-called 'usual suspects' - as well as, perhaps more recognizably 'Woody Allen', the palaver.)

Jonathan Rhys Meyers in Match Point

It is no coincidence that this is Allen's first film set in London, employing an almost entirely British cast of actors. The characters are devoid of the (by now) all-too-familiar 'Woody Allen' New York patois and shtick - this film, Match Point, has an anonymous quality. These missing elements, furthermore, dramatically enhance the pacing of the film so that one becomes aware of being in the hands of an effective storyteller, one whose tale unfolds rapidly through the briefest series of tableaux, without - again - the usual banter so commonly associated with the 'Woody Allen film'.

No - instead one gets a story almost breathtaking in its alacrity, as well as in its concision. Here, the story unfolds as discourse takes a back seat, never interrupting its partner in the driver's seat from moving forward. Gone are those rosy tableaux having nothing to do with moving the plot forward but rather with providing 'ambience'. Here, rather, we are given the most skeletal filling out of scenes - just enough to make them plausible but no more - so that the story rapidly unfolds and one is only aware of perhaps being in the hands of a master storyteller - yet (therefore) not Woody Allen. Add to this the generally younger cast of performers and the lack of either Woody himself or the typical surrogate Woody character (e.g., John Cusack, Kenneth Brannagh) and what one gets is precisely what one had given up hoping to get in a Woody Allen film - namely, a well-told story devoid of authorial interventions.

With Match Point Allen's style becomes defined precisely through the absence of what was previously considered his style, and also what arguably turned so many off from his films (including perhaps even a fairly large number of his so-called fans). Here, then, is a new style -the absence of authorial intervention or vicarious commentary- that makes for pleasurable viewing. In fact, given the absence of these previously stultifying moments and elements, the filmic pace literally keeps one's eyes glued to the screen, watching pure story unfold. As with Bresson, the actors' lack of any particular characteristics, other than those of their roles (themselves almost reduced to 'types'), allows again for the bypassing of 'identification' and, instead, purely detached viewing: one watches these actors without the kind of pleasure so typical to the Woody Allen film, that blend of 'knowingness' and subsequent titillation in which characters speak not so much to each other as to their familiar (knowing) viewer.

Here, instead, we have the interaction of types and, perhaps in a manner akin to Bresson (e.g., in Pickpocket, a film that also shares Dostoyevskian parallels with Match Point), the allowing of pleasure through the development of plot, of elements, rather than characters or ideas. The ideas are formalized and played out in a series of interactions strictly adhering to the duty of moving forward the plot. One would have to go back almost twenty years, to Crimes and Misdemeanors, in fact, to find a film by Woody Allen so effectively made. And immediately one sees the crucial differences, the crucial absences: gone are the 'misdemeanors', that is, those diversionary elements (featuring Allen and Alan Alda and Mia Farrow), the subplots. Similarly, even though one still has the essential existential dilemma as that which Martin Landau faced (no longer the jeune homme of North by Northwest), one no longer has the 'wedding cake ending' (to paraphrase Propp) nor the meta-commentary of the focus of Woody's documentary (within the film), the old philosopher whose bon mots provide the closure of the film, along with the final images of the now-blind Sam Waterston's daughter's wedding (the two accentuating either's ultimately uplifting subtext - or, at least, to paraphrase the former figure, the ability to understand more).

With Match Point, rather, one gets sheer cynicism - Crime and Punishment turned on its head. We have here the cool Bressonian precision in style but in the place of Bressonian faith, a nihilistic utilitarianism. Gone is the Christian cycle of confession-redemption-salvation - instead of Raskolnikov falling to his knees we have the talented Mr. Rhys-Meyers gazing coolly out an upstairs room with a view - a character, indeed, more akin to Highsmith's Ripley (and, indeed, more indebted to him) than either Dostoyevsky's or Bresson's protagonists. (Indeed, more akin to Ripley than either Montgomery Clift or Martin Landau - something closer to Delon in Plein Soleil, Hopper in The American Friend, or even Damon in Ripley.)

In fact, particularly in comparison to the latter parenthetical (and more recent incarnation) we see the further development (or regression) of this type - though, like Damon, Rhys-Meyers cries, it is not at the end - by that point the latter has moved beyond this stage (the interminable fourth stage of Aristotelian drama, when things could still go either way). Only, to come full circle, in the music accompanying the closing credits of Match Point -the earlier Furtiva lagrima- do we get something akin to that wavering romanticism and, as with the premise to the opening Turing Test, without this latter bookend, the film's auteurship (as decidedly 'Woody Allen', a category earlier more easily identifiable as precisely the style of sentimentality that has now been overcome) is indecipherable - or more precisely, more of the order/ing of Gaspar Noe's Irreversible, itself (along with Carax's Pola X, itself a 'remaking' of an earlier text contemporary to Crime and Punishment) a further development of cynicism: not that "talent is luck" but, rather, that luck only benefits nihilists.

It has taken Allen nearly twenty years to make a masterpiece - the proof is that you can't tell it was he - and not some fresh and new auteur - who made it.

Ajay Gehlawat is PhD student in the Theatre department.