Cannes 2010: "You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger", de Woody Allen (Clarín)

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Cannes 2010: "You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger", de Woody Allen (fotos)

En defensa de Woody Allen

Ok, me cansé. Acá, evidentemente, pasa algo muy extraño, algo que sostiene mi vieja teoría de los "localismos" o el "doble chequeo". Woody Allen estrena hoy una película en los Estados Unidos, la primera que hace allí luego de cuatro en el exterior. Se titula "Whatever Works" y la protagoniza Larry David. Ahora bien, las críticas que recibe son bastante malas.

No vi la película y creo que la última suya que realmente me gustó de Woody Allen debe haber sido "Todos dicen te amo", de 1996. Asi que mi defensa de Allen y de la película que no vi me resulta curiosa. Es que me llama la atención que los mismos críticos que defendieron casi todo lo que hizo Allen en "el exterior" (de "Match Point" a "Vicky Cristina Barcelona"), que son igual de malas o peores que las que había hecho antes, apenas el tipo pisa Manhattan lo crucifican.

Se lee en las críticas que los personajes no son creíbles, que los acentos sureños no corresponden, que los chistes son malos y viejos, que los diálogos no se ajustan a la época. Supongamos que están en lo cierto: ¿creerán ellos que los ingleses no veían lo mismo en su película inglesa y los españoles y muchos hispanoparlantes no pensamos lo mismo de la que hizo en Barcelona?

Parece que cuando un cineasta sale al exterior los críticos "locales" le permiten cagarse olímpicamente en cualquier tipo de realismo o plausibilidad porque no tienen forma de comprobarla, mientras que si cruza la calle 86 y el negocio de la esquina no es el correcto, pueden caerle encima sin ningún problema.

Así, seguramente, haremos los argentinos con "Tetro", película que los norteamericanos alaban y la que, imagino, nos pondrá los pelos de punta apenas veamos algo fuera de lugar, un cliché localista o una postalita turística de Buenos Aires. Y lo mismo hacen en EE.UU. con Allen cuando filma lo que todos conocen.

Sin haber estado en Cataluña más que dos semanas en toda mi vida, les puedo asegurar que el realismo y la plausibilidad de la historia de VCB es nula, y los diálogos --en castellano, especialmente-- son ridículos. Pero claro nadie fuera de España parece darse cuenta. Supongo que no sabremos tampoco nosotros si el acento sureño de Evan Rachel Wood es correcto o no en "Whatever Works". Pero el problema es que seguiremos juzgándolo con distintas varas.

Digamos, para ir a lo más probable, que WW debe ser tan mala como todas las películas que Woody hizo en la última década, más allá del realismo, de los acentos, de la forma de hablar y de si los chistes son viejos o no. Igual, me queda una esperanza de que Larry David me haga reír. Para misántropos, pocos como él.

¿Para cuando la película de Woody con Jerry Seinfeld?

Entrevista a Woody Allen (Los Angeles Weekly)

By Scott Foundas

The new Woody Allen film, Whatever Works — his 40th for those keeping count — signals a return for the filmmaker in more ways than one. For starters, it is his first film to shoot on location in New York since Melinda and Melinda in 2004, interrupting a half-decade European vacation during which the 73-year-old Allen has directed three films in London and one in Spain. It also marks the realization of a project he first conceived in the 1970s as a vehicle for Zero Mostel, then set aside following the actor’s untimely death. The result is a light comic burlesque — a minor key but eminently pleasurable Allen confection — starring Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm mastermind Larry David as Boris Yellnikoff, an atheistic, egotistical, misanthropic physics professor whose contempt for the entire human race is lessened by his chance meeting with (and eventual marriage to) the ditzy Southern belle (Evan Rachel Wood) he finds squatting underneath his backstairs.

Allen is running late on the sunny May afternoon, when I show up at his Upper East Side editing room, tucked away inconspicuously behind a door labeled “Manhattan Film Center” on the ground floor of an otherwise residential building. It’s here that Allen cuts all his films, screens them (and others) in a soundproof, green velour screening room, auditions actors for his upcoming projects (and there is always an upcoming project), and otherwise holds court. On the two previous occasions I have come here to interview him, the results have never been less than surprising, Allen holding forth with unexpected candor and ease about his films and about the cosmic matters that weigh heavy on his soul. And today is no exception, as Allen enters in his signature attire of pastel button-down, khaki trousers and well-worn brown lace-ups, apologizes for his lateness, and proceeds to talk at length about the meaning of life (or lack thereof), the trouble with actors, and the allure of younger women.

L.A. WEEKLY: The title Whatever Works suggests a philosophy of life but also a work ethic. In other words, if you make a film a year, as you do, you can’t afford to sit around waiting for the muses to descend.

WOODY ALLEN: I’ve never been someone who’s waited for the muses, because my background is in television. When I came up, we used to write shows, and if you were writing for Gary Moore or Sid Caesar — whoever it was — you had to have a show. It was live. When you came in on a Monday morning, you had to think of something. You couldn’t wait for inspiration; you just had to do it. So I got used to that, and I can do it to this day. I can go into a room and — it doesn’t always come out good — but I can produce something. I do think it’s an ethic. It keeps you out of mischief. If you work, it keeps you distracted. It keeps you from thinking about yourself too much, about how terrible you are, about how great you are. It’s certainly humbling.

I’ve often used this comparison: With mental patients in an institution, they give them basket weaving, finger painting and things like that to do, because the very act of working with your hands is healthful and therapeutic. It’s the same thing with making a film, which is a handmade product. You have to write it, you have to go out and shoot it, then we come here and we put the film together and put the music in. For a period of time, you get two rewards: You get the reward of distraction — you don’t think about the outside world, and you’re faced with solvable problems, and if they’re not solvable, you don’t die because of it. And then, if it’s the right film, you get to live in a fake reality for a number of months. So if I’m making a picture like The Purple Rose of Cairo or Bullets Over Broadway or Everyone Says I Love You, for several months, I get to live with very beautiful women and very witty men and they have costumes, and the sets are beautiful. It’s a very pleasant way to waste your life.

It’s funny that you mention those three films in particular because, like them, Whatever Works seems like a fantasy. The characters and the story all have a heightened, exaggerated feel.

Right, it’s a cartoon tale. The mother, the father — everyone in the movie is cartoonlike.

I was also reminded of two of your more recent films, Match Point and Cassandra’s Dream, both of which also concern luck, chance and the randomness of life, even though Whatever Works is actually a script you wrote more than 30 years ago. When we spoke at the time of the release of Match Point, you said, “You’re always searching for control, and in the end, you’re at the mercy of the hoisted piano not falling on your head.” And here there is a scene in which a person falls from a window onto another person’s head!

The same obsessions I had when I first started, I have now. I’ve been in psychoanalysis, I’ve been successful, I’ve had ups, I’ve had downs. I’ve had some hit movies, movies that failed. But with everything that’s happened to me, all of my experiences, I’ve never been able to solve the real problems of life that have plagued every playwright since Euripides and Aristophanes. No progress has been made on the existential themes and the subject of interpersonal relations, which are still brutal and painful and fragile and very hard to make work, and which cause everybody an enormous amount of suffering and grief. Why are we here? What is the point of it all?

Take Camus’ question [in The Myth of Sisyphus] of whether or not to commit suicide. Now, even the most grim people come to rationalizations where, in Camus’ case, he feels that pushing the rock up the hill, the doing of it, is worth it and you don’t have to succeed. But I feel — in answer to the question of why should we not kill ourselves given a meaningless, godless existence — that it’s a pre-intellectual question, and that your body answers it for you. Your mind will never be able to give you a convincing justification for living your life, because from a logical point of view, if your life is indeed meaningless — which it is — and there’s nothing out there, what is the point of it? Well, the point of it is only that you’re too scared to terminate it because you’re hard-wired, it’s in your blood, to live and to want to live and to want to protect yourself. So, while I’m home babbling about how meaningless life is and how cruel and brutal and without any purpose, if there’s a fire in my house, I’ll go to extreme measures to save my life. And then when I’ve saved my life, I’ll say to myself, “Why did you bother to do that?”

Even by the standards of some of the antisocial, unlikable characters you’ve written in the past, including the ones you yourself played in Anything Else and Deconstructing Harry, Boris seems a step beyond.

You know, at one point I was going to call this film, when I first wrote it for Zero, The Worst Man in the World. I thought it would be a funny character — a guy who is the quintessence of misanthropy and who can’t fit in, doesn’t want to fit in, rejects everything, just isn’t someone who can deal with life or wants to deal with it. He doesn’t accept it: He finds the fact that he’s mortal to be unacceptable. He cannot agree to the rules of life. The characters I’ve played in those other movies were certainly in that direction but not as extreme as I wanted to make the character of Boris.

Did you, at any point in the past three decades, consider playing the role yourself?

No, because when I thought of it for Zero, I thought of it as a part for a fat man. I thought of him as a big, aggressive physicist, a Russian chess genius who had no time for “microbes” and “earthworms.” And I can’t do that. My source of comedy is more victim — I find myself frightened when I hear the noise in the other room, that sort of thing. This guy was grandiose. It was hard to think of people who could play him now, and then [casting director] Juliet Taylor mentioned Larry, whom I had worked with very briefly before and whom I knew from Curb Your Enthusiasm. But it seemed to me that he could do it, because on his television show he’s very authentic. He’s not an overacter or a fake posturer. Of course, he told me up and down the line how he couldn’t do it, how he’s not an actor and this and that, and then I knew he’d be great. Because it’s the ones like Diane Keaton, who tell you how bad they are, who always come through. It’s the ones who tell you how great they are who never come through.

People who can act are naturals. Over the years, I’ve met and worked with people who studied all over the place, and if they had natural talent, it was great. If they didn’t, the fact that they had studied didn’t mean anything. I’ve gotten guys off the street — literally off the street — who come in here and, when they speak, they’re un–self-conscious and authentic. Whereas, with a lot of professional actors, they come in to meet for a part and we’ll be chatting like we’re chatting now, and they’re just fine. Then, they read the part and they go into their acting mode, and everything about them suddenly becomes inauthentic. They feel they have to do something to the material or they’re not justifying their paycheck. So they start acting it, and you don’t want them to act it; you want them to just say it. If they’re supposed to be a salesman, you want them to be a salesman like you’d experience a salesman. But they don’t. They start playing a salesman.

The real revelation in the film, I think, is Evan Rachel Wood, who has been very strong in a number of movies but who hasn’t had an opportunity to play this sort of 1930s screwball ingénue.

I had never heard of her, and my wife said you should look at this girl Evan Rachel Wood, because I saw her in one or two movies and she’s just great. Then a few days after that, [production designer] Santo Loquasto was talking to me and he said the exact same thing. So I checked her out and saw that she was a remarkable actress — complicated and dark, really exceptional. I didn’t know if she could do comedy or not. I thought she could, and she agreed to do it, so I assumed she wouldn’t agree to do it if she didn’t think she could. And so she did it and she was incredibly good. I said to her, “It’s a Southern girl, you’re going to have to do a Southern accent,” and she wouldn’t do it for me, wouldn’t show me her Southern accent until we shot. Now, I can empathize with that. It’s risky, because if she couldn’t do it, I would have been in very serious trouble. But she did it, and she just did it great.

On the other hand, Ed Begley Jr. [who plays Wood’s father] had no idea he was going to be required to do a Southern accent. He came to New York, got into costume, came to the set. The first shot we shot in the movie was with him, and he had no idea. I said, “You know you’re going to have to play this with a Southern accent. You do do a Southern accent, right?” He said, “Well, I think I can.” I said, “Okay, because I assumed you knew that when you read it.” But he didn’t, and he just simply did it. So much for all this meticulous preparing.

So much for The Method.

I was with a Japanese lady yesterday, who was in town doing interviews because Vicky Cristina Barcelona is opening in Japan. She asked me what pictures I’ve liked [recently] and I mentioned Rachel Getting Married, which was a picture I liked very much. She said she had interviewed Jonathan Demme and he had said it was the first time he shot a picture without rehearsals, and of course everyone in it was great and it was a wonderful picture. I, on the other hand, have never done rehearsals. I just don’t think they’re necessary. And yet, there are directors — great directors, like Ingmar Bergman — who would rehearse and rehearse. I wouldn’t know what to do at a rehearsal. When I was in Paul Mazursky’s Scenes From a Mall, he did extensive rehearsing, and he’s a wonderful guy and a wonderful director, but I thought it was nuts at the time. I thought, “How do you have the patience for this?” But that’s how he works. I just never put a minute’s thought into it beforehand, to the point where an actor will come to the set not even knowing he’s got to do a Southern accent. And yes, I could have been very traumatized if he had said, “Oh, I can’t do a Southern accent. I just can’t do one. If you need British, fine, but I can’t do Southern.” So I’ve been lucky that way, that I haven’t run into a catastrophe. It’s the same thing if there’s a scene with a lot of physical action. I work it out with the cameraman and bring in the actor with no rehearsal and say, “Start over here and go over there and pick up a cigarette and then come over here,” and 99 percent of the time that’s exactly what they do and it looks fine. Once in a great while, someone will say, “I don’t know what I’m doing over there. I’d feel better walking over to the window.” And I always say, “So, walk to the window.”

The film suggests that Boris is redeemed, humanized in a way by his encounter with this much younger woman, and you yourself have said that you’ve found a happiness with your wife, Soon-Yi, that you never imagined you would find with a younger Korean woman who has no connection to the film industry.

In fiction, that was even a theme as far back as Manhattan, that in this presumably more innocent, younger person — before they get spoiled by the world — that one can find a certain happiness. Mine was very good luck, personally, that way, but that has always been an idea of mine going back quite far. Even Annie Hall, when you think of it, was kind of a naive girl from Chippewa Falls, who was young and came to New York and knew nothing and was a real hick, a rube, with all her colloquial expressions but with the thought that she would become a mature woman. At that time, she represented for me the same kind of freshness.

When we spoke last year, you were just about to come to Los Angeles to direct your first opera, Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi, and you joked that you were going to skip town quickly before anyone had the chance to tar and feather you for it.

It turned out in the end to be quite a pleasant experience, because I was surrounded by gifted people. The cast was wonderful; I didn’t cast them, they gave me the cast. The conductor was wonderful. It was just a pleasure. And, of course, I was working with a piece of material that’s great. It was the first time I directed anything that wasn’t mine, and so I could devote myself strictly to directing. I didn’t have to write and constantly patch up bad writing. This is what I’m doing all the time in my own films. They’re always an original script, and they’re all full of mistakes. It’s not like it’s a Broadway show, where I take it out of town and iron the kinks out. With a movie, this is it, so I’m rewriting all the time and fixing and helping and adjusting. Here, Puccini has a little masterpiece both musically and in terms of the story, so all I had to do was mount it. Now, it’s a short opera, and I don’t think I could do Aida with the elephants.

Is there anything you can say about the film you are preparing to shoot this summer, other than that it takes place in London again and stars Naomi Watts?

You know the full cast, right? Anthony Hopkins, Frida Pinto, Josh Brolin, Antonio Banderas. The cast is great. It’s a comedy-drama, I can tell you that. It’s a comic film but comic in the way that either Vicky Cristina or Hannah and Her Sisters was. It’s not comic like Bananas. This is real, with a serious side to it but hopefully a reasonable amount of laughs. Hopefully.

Whatever Works opens in Los Angeles theaters on Friday, June 19.

"Whatever Works", de Woody Allen (Village Voice)

By J. Hoberman

Character is destiny—at least for Woody Allen's Whatever Works. Allen's exercise in Woody Allen nostalgia opens with a snatch of Groucho Marx singing his trademark paradoxical assertion ("Hello, I must be going") and is powered almost entirely by the presence of a single, larger-than-life, and less-than-likeable, figure.

Whatever Works is Allen's first New York movie after five years abroad. It's his first in even longer to center on the Woody Allen character—an urban neurotic wise guy, here named Boris Yellnikoff and brashly played (or rather, brayed) by HBO star Larry David. Toughened and (relatively) rejuvenated by David's aggressive performance, the Allen surrogate is introduced treating his café friends to a lecture on the "God racket," which segues into a rant against the stupidity of feel-good movies. Hah!

Nothing especially new—Allen wrote this script 30 years ago and intended it for no less a force of nature than Zero Mostel. What gives the material weight is the loquacious curmudgeon's derisive half-smile. Nastier than David's character on Curb Your Enthusiasm, Boris is a cousin to insult comedian Don Rickles or former New York mayor Ed Koch—a smug, self-absorbed, argumentative nudnik with unshakeable faith in his listeners' stupidity and his own "huge worldview." Resplendent in T-shirt and plaid Bermuda shorts as he limp-lurches toward the camera to buttonhole the viewer, this boorish yelling-kopf writes the check for a comic masterpiece that Whatever Works is unable to cash.

A former physics professor who gimped his leg in a ridiculous suicide attempt, Boris supports himself teaching chess to kids whom he derisively browbeats as "patzers," pint-size versions of the "mindless zombie morons" who populate the Earth. In an earlier era, he might have been the rudest of waiters in a dairy restaurant. Is there anything at all that could rock this schmuck's world? Whatever Works shifts into gear when Boris finds a teenage runaway named Melodie (Evan Rachel Wood) camped out in front of his anachronistically shabby downtown digs, and grudgingly takes her in.

Of course, Melodie is also a type. Woody Allen looks at her and hears America singing. She's a cheerful, optimistic, winsome Mississippi belle—Margaret Dumont meets Daisy Mae or, as her benefactor ungraciously puts it, "a character out of Faulkner not unlike Benjy"—so apparently stupid that she doesn't get Boris's sarcasm and even develops a crush on him. They "date" (he takes her to Grant's Tomb and Yonah Shimmel's knishery), and, living out the Woodman's fondest fantasy, they marry.

The wonder of Melodie's character is that she manages to internalize Boris's crabby, karping worldview while maintaining her sweet and tolerant disposition. Sex aside, Yellnikoff's cronies wonder what he sees in her. "She keeps me company at the Emergency Room when I'm convinced my mosquito bite is a melanoma," he explains. It's less apparent what Melodie sees in him, until her estranged parents, Marietta (Patricia Clarkson) and John (Ed Begley Jr.), arrive. Still, the introduction of these well-off, white-bread, Jesus-praising "aborigines," as their son-in-law characterizes them, serves to upstage and hence diminish Allen's antihero even as Allen's own narcissism is globalized—there's no one so primitive they won't be grateful for an introduction to Manhattan sophistication. The yokels come to New York and, casting off the shackles of their benighted upbringings, go native. It is at this point that the movie dons its jammies and goes to sleep.

Like previous Woody Allen characters, Boris is allowed to directly address the audience: "I'm the only one who sees the big picture," he explains. But what sort of perspective is there when a movie that goes out of its way to mock It's a Wonderful Life winds up even more lazily pandering? To drown Boris's bitterness in a sickly vat of Manischewitz is the aesthetic equivalent of depraved indifference. Whatever Works illustrates, even as it names, Allen's artistic limitations.

To suggest, as Mark Harris did in a recent New York cover story, that Whatever Works marks the end of Jewish humor as we know it is to give this blown opportunity more significance than it warrants. Allen did invent and inhabit the persona of an anxious misfit, but, as ambitious as he is, he never came close to producing a truly corrosive, antisocial comic work—an equivalent to Portnoy's Complaint, the original version of The Producers, Borat, or any number of Lenny Bruce monologues. His problem, as Boris would surely have deduced, is a pathetic desire to be loved. He wants to make nice—it's just his nature.

Entrevista a Woody Allen (Audio/NPR)

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Fresh Air from WHYY, June 15, 2009 · After more than five decades of making movies, Academy Award-winning writer and director Woody Allen has made his 40th film, Whatever Works. The movie, which stars Larry David and Evan Rachel Wood, tells the story of a "genius" professor in New York who ditches his upper-class life for something simpler — winning, along the way, the devotion of a beautiful young girl from Mississippi who is almost 40 years his junior.

Though audiences may see parallels between the character's relationship with a younger woman and Allen's own marriage to Soon-Yi Previn, Allen tells Terry Gross that the film is purely fictional.

"People always look for clues [about me] in my movies … no matter how many times I've told them over the years I make this stuff up," he says.

Allen is often seen as a mousy intellectual type who hides behind black-rimmed glasses, but he says that that identity isn't an accurate portrayal of who he really is. He played ball, won track medals and flunked out of college as a motion picture production major.

"I'm the guy you see in his T-shirt with a beer watching the baseball game at night at home with the television," says Allen. "I was never a loner or a loser — always the first one picked for the team."

Allen says that he originally wrote Whatever Works for the legendary actor Zero Mostel in the 1970s, but then put the script aside. Thirty years later, he dusted it off again when he needed a quick script to beat the writers' strike.

For Allen, filmmaking is an art that, he says, "distracts me from the uncertainty of life, the inevitability of aging and death and death of loved ones; mass killings and starvation, from holocausts — not just man-made carnage, but the existential position you're in."

Nicole Kidman deja colgado a Woody Allen

La actriz australiana se había comprometido a fomar parte del reparto de la próxima película de Woody Allen, en la que ya han confirmado su participación Anthony Hopkins, Josh Brolin, Naomi Watts, Antonio Banderas y Freida Pinto. Pero finalmente, y debido a las tan socorridas y ambiguas “discrepancias creativas”, Kidman ha preferido desligarse del film, todavía sin título.

"Whatever Works", de Woody Allen (Variety review)

(U.S.-France) A Sony Pictures Classics (in U.S.) release of a Wild Bunch (France)/Gravier Prods. (U.S.) presentation of a Perdido (U.S.) production. Produced by Letty Aronson, Stephen Tenenbaum. Executive producers, Vincent Maraval, Brahim Chioua. Co-producer, Helen Robin. Co-executive producers, Jack Rollins, Charles H. Joffe. Directed, written by Woody Allen.

Boris Yellnikoff - Larry David
Melody - Evan Rachel Wood
Marietta - Patricia Clarkson
John - Ed Begley Jr.
Joe - Michael McKean
Randy James - Henry Cavill
Perry - John Gallagher Jr.
Helena - Jessica Hecht
Jessica - Carolyn McCormick
Howard - Christopher Evan Welch

By RONNIE SCHEIB

"Whatever Works," Woody Allen's prodigal return to New York, takes the disconcerting form of a disquisition on quantum physics, love and chance, ranted directly to the camera by terminally misanthropic Larry David. Though stuffed with witty one-liners and wondrously convoluted tirades, this far-fetched, deliberately artificial game of musical chairs -- in which mismatched characters encircle, attract and repel each other -- feels forced, often losing itself in excess verbiage. Still, the David/Allen hybrid makes for a fascinating beast, of interest to acolytes of both comedians, if a far cry from "Vicky Cristina Barcelona," whose B.O. haul is unlikely to be matched by this June 19 Sony Classics release.

Dusting off a script he wrote more than 30 years ago, Allen casts David as Boris Yellnikoff, a brilliant string theorist "almost nominated for the Nobel Prize." Consumed by the big picture of the universe hurtling toward its own extinction, Boris despises all mankind, apparently angry that people are too stupid to be depressed. Having abandoned his rich wife and uptown apartment by jumping out a window in a failed suicide attempt, a limping Boris survives in a dilapidated apartment near Chinatown, supporting himself by teaching chess to little kids he flagrantly insults ("Inchworm!" "Sub-mental cretin!") and hanging out with old academic pals (Michael McKean, Conleth Hill), who are amused but unconvinced by his vitriolic spewings.

Into this semi-hermetic existence stumbles Melody St. Ann Celestine (Evan Rachel Wood), a young blonde pageant queen from the Deep South, sweet as pie and dumb as dirt. While she cooks him crayfish and calms his anxiety attacks with Fred Astaire movies, Boris alternately bemoans Melody's dimwittedness and regales her eager mind with everything from the Heisenberg uncertainty principle to a "Mikado"-like list of petty crimes that should be punishable by death. Much of the pic's comedy revolves around Melody's skewed or surprisingly apt regurgitations of his teachings, and Wood handles the evolution of her improbably Daisy Mae-ish character with surprising finesse.

A year into the odd couple's union, fate comes knocking at the door (to the opening bars of Beethoven's Fifth) in the form of Melody's Bible-spouting mother Marietta (Patricia Clarkson, in typically high-drama mode), who greets the sight of her daughter's irascible, elderly, gimpy hubby by falling out of frame in a dead faint.

But hedonistic New York proves the making of Marietta -- instantly divesting her of her born-again Christian mindset, liberating her starved sexuality and validating her amateur photography. Indeed, the city is big enough to turn around even the most backward misguided soul: When Melody's gun-fetishizing dad (Ed Begley Jr.) finally arrives, he too sees the light, thus proving the pic's moral that one must grasp whatever works to bring a bit of joy into a benighted world.

Throughout "Whatever Works," there are moments of discordance, ghostly echoes of the alter-ego problem Allen has faced for years in the absence of himself as central character.

On the plus side, Allen avoids the creepy ventriloquist effect of a younger actor mouthing his words and intonations by choosing as raucously individualistic a performer as David. Boris, who turns everyday anxieties are turned into cosmic angst (he periodically wakes up in cold sweats chanting Kurtz's "the horror ... the horror"), reps a distinct variation on Allen's persona. Boris may be a cooler know-it-all on the surface, but his equilibrium is more easily shaken, as demonstrated by his reaction when Melody drifts toward a Viagra-free relationship with a younger prospect (Henry Cavill).

But by forcing David, a total improviser who rarely delivers scripted lines, to incant impossibly long monologues (his to-the-camera ramblings effectively self-kidded by the visible bewilderment of the other cast members), Allen the director loses sight of what works. The film lacks breathing room -- it rushes forward like a stage play with pre-planned exits and entrances, soliloquies and asides. Even the city appears to be a set, with real Chinatown locations looking like isolated backdrops and touristy glimpses of Grant's Tomb and the Statue of Liberty sardonically inserted.

Kudos to David for having collaborated with the two greatest comedy icons of the generation prior to his: Allen here and Mel Brooks on TV (the entire fourth season of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" involves David's fictional assumption of the Bialystock role in Broadway's "The Producers"). It's undeniable that David's rawer comic style jibes more felicitously with Brooks' unromantic ethos, yet oddly, in keeping with the pic's celebration of random coincidence, both the Bialystock and Boris parts were originally conceived for Zero Mostel.

Camera (Technicolor), Harris Savides; editor, Alisa Lepselter; production designer, Santo Loquasto; art director, Tom Warren; set decorator, Ellen Christiansen; costume designer, Suzy Benzinger; sound (Dolby Digital), Gary Alper, supervising sound editor, Robert Hein; re-recording mixer, Lee Dichter; visual effects supervisor, Randy Balsmeyer; visual effects, Big Film Design; stunt coordinator, Peter Bucossi; assistant director, Richard Patrick; casting, Juliet Taylor, Laura Rosenthal, Ali Farrell. Reviewed at Tribeca Film Festival (opener), April 22, 2009. MPAA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 92 MIN.

Woody Allen abre Tribeca

The world premiere of Woody Allen’s Whatever Works starring Larry David, Evan Rachel Wood, Patricia Clarkson and Ed Begley Jr will open the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival on April 22.

The picture’s North American distributor Sony Pictures Classics plans a summer release and said the opening night marked "the perfect opportunity to celebrate Woody Allen's return to film-making in New York."

"I fell in love with New York through Woody Allen’s movies," Tribeca co-founder Jane Rosenthal said, adding: "Whatever Works is a uniquely funny addition to his body of work."

The festival will announce its slate on March 9 and 11 and is scheduled to run from April 22-May 3.

Excerpts From the Spanish Diary

Prueba de que Woody Allen debería volver a dedicarse a escribir cuentos o ensayos es este simpático (y falso, imagino) diario de rodaje de "Vicky Cristina Barcelona" que publicó ayer "The New York Times". Si sus películas fueran la mitad de graciosas que este texto (en inglés, claro), serían tolerables.

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El problema del lenguaje en el cine (o cómo decir bien "niñata de mierda")

Hace años que insisto que uno de los temas menos analizados a la hora de hablar de cine es el de la credibilidad de los diálogos y de los actores, y de un término que me gusta llamar "doble chequeo" respecto a ese tema.

Veamos. Hay una esencial diferencia entre un espectador que es del mismo país de la película que ve, y uno que no lo es. Y eso es lo que yo llamo "el doble chequeo". Cuando uno escucha un texto dicho por un actor --en mi caso, argentino-- no sólo uno analiza lo que habitualmente se analiza sino que, además, realiza un casi inconsciente chequeo de "plausibilidad". No digo, necesariamente, de realismo, porque hay muchas películas que no apuestan por ese registro, pero sí al menos que los textos funcionen dentro de un cierto sistema, que lo que se diga sea algo "decible".

Es por eso que, si uno ve por ejemplo una telenovela con actores argentinos en la que todos hablan de "tú", hay una incomodidad natural, un cierto fastidio, una sensación de engaño, de falsedad. Yendo a cosas más específicas --y salvo que se trate de una propuesta muy particular en el término del manejo del lenguaje, como pueden ser las películas de Martín Rejtman en las que los diálogos apuestan por la musicalidad más que por la plausibilidad--, cuando uno escucha a un actor argentino hablando de determinadas maneras o usando ciertos textos que, para uno al menos, son "indecibles", hay una suerte de fricción, de molestia.

Eso, claro, no le sucede a alguien que no es argentino. Puede escuchar a un actor nuestro diciendo un texto y leerá los subtítulos y jamás sabrá si ese tipo de persona en esa determinada situación podría o no usar esos términos. Eso ha generado muchas veces que películas que son para nosotos imposiblemente falsas o mal actuadas sean valoradas mucho más afuera del país. Eso hace también --al menos para mí-- que, por ejemplo, los españoles crean que los actores argentinos son buenísimos y que muchos argentinos no entiendan esta valoración y crean que, de hecho, es exactamente al revés.

Eso hace que los norteamericanos se asombren cuando una película de Wong Kar-wai está hablada en inglés y noten que sus diálogos son imposibles de decir cuando, probablemente, eso mismo pensaba una persona de Hong Kong de sus películas previas. Y así podríamos seguir indefinidamente, aunque un caso que siempre me viene a la mente es el de un colega francés que me hablaba de su dificultad con las películas de Eric Rohmer porque, me decía, "nadie habla así en Francia".

Todo esto viene a cuento de las muy buenas críticas que está teniendo "Vicky Cristina Barcelona", de Woody Allen, en su estreno en los Estados Unidos. Recordemos: los norteamericanos venían odiándolo cuando filmaba en Nueva York, especialmente en ese "doble chequeo", considerando que los personajes, los diálogos y las situaciones de sus películas eran imposibles desde una óptica realista. "Nadie habla así en Nueva York", "nadie con ese trabajo vive en ese lugar en Manhattan", y así.

Cuando se fue a Gran Bretaña, los norteamericanos empezaron a decir que Allen había mejorado. Los ingleses, en cambio, se espantaron, exactamente con los mismos argumentos que los norteamericanos usaban antes, en especial ante los aplausos que recibió "Match Point", película que fastidió a los británicos por este mismo motivo.

Ahora llega "Vicky Cristina Barcelona" y tanto ingleses como norteamericanos dicen que es lo mejor que Allen ha hecho en mucho tiempo. Los españoles, en cambio, al menos con los que yo hablé, están espantados. ¿Qué es esa Barcelona de postal turística? ¿Qué son esos personajes? ¿Qué son esos diálogos, esos errores geográficos, esas situaciones?

Todo esto no hace más que comprobar mi pequeña teoría. Un caso opuesto, por ejemplo, es el de "La mujer sin cabeza", que a todo argentino impresionará por la justeza casi antropológica de cada línea de diálogo superpuesta, mientras que un público extranjero pasará casi por alto ese aspecto de la película, ya que los subtítulos no le hacen ninguna justicia a "el decir" de cada personaje y lo apropiado que resulta en cada circunstancia.

Me intriga cómo verán la película de Woody Allen aquí. Estoy seguro que será un éxito sólo por el hecho de contar con Scarlett y Penélope y por mostrar postalitas catalanas. ¿Pero alguien se tragará el personaje de latin lover de Bardem sin sentir cierta vergüenza ajena? Por lo pronto, los franceses los siguen aplaudiendo en todo lo que hace. Esperen a que filme una película en París, y en francés, y después les cuento...

Vicky Cristina San Sebastián

Era previsible el anuncio: "Vicky Cristina Barcelona" será la inauguración del Festival de San Sebastián. Estarán Woody, Penélope, Javier, Scarlett y Rebecca Hall (la única que necesita apellido a estas alturas). Todo está tan perfectamente calculado que la película se estrenará en España un día después de la inauguración. No voy a estar allí, pero me da verdadera curiosidad saber cómo será recibida la película. Imagino que, siendo San Sebastián el festival más "tilingo" de toda España y tomando en cuenta que Woody sigue siendo allí (como aquí) un semidios, tendrá ovaciones y aplausos y todo eso. Y también me imagino a un grupillo rebelde, ofuscado e irritado con la película y con toda la pompa y circunstancia.

Y pensar que el año pasado abrieron con "Eastern Promises"...