Cinema: A Comic Master Goes for Baroque

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STARDUST MEMORIES Directed and Written by Woody Allen

From the outside, celebrity means receiving invitations to all the best parties, swapping aperçus with the noterati and finding beautiful women draped around your calves begging for a one-night meaningful experience. From the inside—of Woody Allen's head—celebrity is all of this, and ain't it awful? It means being introduced to a woman who wrote "the definitive cinematic study of Gummo Marx." It means being offered unproducible scripts, including a musical-comedy treatment of the Guyana massacre. It means being solicited to join committees for Soviet dissidents, to help stamp out leukemia, to donate a personal item to a celebrity auction for the blind ("Somebody told me you wear a truss. An old truss would be just wonderful"). It means being asked to sit for an interview on "the shallow indifference of wealthy celebrities." And everywhere there are autograph freaks. A young woman asks, "Would you sign my left breast?" He does. A man shoves a piece of paper in his face and says, "Could you just write 'To Phyllis Weinstein—you unfaithful lying bitch'?" He escapes the mob for a drive on a deserted road with a pretty girl and, naturally, his Rolls-Royce overheats.

Stardust Memories is Woody Allen's 8½.Taking his cue from Federico Fellini's great comic fantasy, Allen has set his film in a resort hotel and cast himself as a film maker, very much like the Woody Allen we think we know, who finds himself in a creative culdesac. The film mixes memory and fantasy with the surreal-life present. Its visual style is a gloss on 8½'s: seductive black-and-white images, express-train pacing, a foregrounding of comic bit players. The three main women in 8½ (a mistress, a wife, an earthy guardian angel) find their echoes here in Charlotte Rampling, Marie-Christine Barrault and Jessica Harper. Allen also appropriates Fellini's strategy of deflecting criticism by placing it in his film—in the mouths of buffoons. Predators and editors, gargoyles and groupies, all want a piece of his present and a lock on his future—his promise to make the kind of romantic comedies that established his cult, which for him means a return to the played-out past. He rejects this advice, but he can't escape it. He even dreams of encountering an extraterrestrial who tells him: "You want to do mankind a real service? Tell funnier jokes."