To Rome with Love

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To Rome with Love
Directed by Woody Allen
Written by Woody Allen
with Jesse Eisenberg, Penelope Cruz, Roberto Benigni
2012

I’m not well versed in Woody Allen’s work, but as soon as I heard about this film I accurately guessed it would be an ersatz Fellini homage arranged around some lazy home truths about romance. OK, so the assumption it would be a romantic comedy wasn’t especially insightful, but when someone who’s seen two-and-a-half of your films can prophesy the references of your next one, that’s something to think about, isn’t it?

To Rome with Love is a lazy, multiple-strand story based around finding love of different kinds in the “Eternal City”, lazy in that the switching between short narratives comes across as an inability to come up with a full length one more than any other device. Experience guides youth through romantic upheaval, small town newly weds get caught up in fantasies only the big city can provide, and Roberto Benigni stars in a totally unnecessary mini-update of Le Dolce Vita. Allen himself makes an increasingly rare appearance as one half of an American couple visiting Rome to meet their daughter’s fiancé; a retired opera producer, her finds a hidden gem in the singing voice of the father of his future son-in-law. To be fair, this sequence of events leads to the one piece of imagery that might live up to the film’s pretensions.

You can tell this film came off the back of Midnight in Paris: it’s another New World love letter to an Old World centre of culture, with half the dialogue stemming from the characters walking around talking about how wonderful it all is. This is by far the most irritating thing about the film – living in London I hear enough cultural criticism regurgitated by tourists from a book, and when I go to see a film I don’t want the dialogue to be outshone by what you hear hanging around the National Gallery. Allen always includes one figure meant to satirise middle-class intellectual pretensions (in this case Ellen Page’s attention-deficit actress), but the problem is that to me they never sound that distinguishable from all the other characters. That’s unless they say something especially grotesque, in which case instead of laughing I just curl up inside. Allen’s claim that he just makes films for himself in order to keep busy is very easy to believe here.
Tom

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