In recent years, funding from overseas and perhaps a late surge of curiosity have brought Allen to Europe. His city dwellers may have decamped for the country at times, and Atlantic City turned up for parts of “Sweet and Lowdown,” but the suburbs, the Midwest, and California (except for brief, uncomfortable trips in “Annie Hall”) might never have existed. The Upper East Side was the great good place. The Brooklyn boy had triumphed in Manhattan, and he turned its tree-lined side streets, with their attendant muses-Gershwin and Porter, Ellington and Armstrong-into an achieved grail of success, taste, and artistic harmony. ![]() Illustration by Jonas Bergstrandįor a long time, after the early slapstick comedies, Allen’s movies hardly left the Upper East Side. Woody Allen’s film tells four stories-in English and Italian. “To Rome with Love” is an old man’s rejection of mortality. He appears in the film, as a grouchily retired opera director, and Judy Davis, who plays his psychiatrist wife, says to him, “You equate retirement with death.” That sounds about right. ![]() Allen, now seventy-six, revises some of his old ideas and devices, but he’s not a man given to summing up he keeps moving ahead. The action is kaleidoscopic yet never rushed or scattered, and the movie, down to the smallest scene, hangs together thematically. There are thirteen major characters and several minor ones-Americans and Italians mixing it up on the streets and in hotel beds. We’re in the realm of miraculous transformation-transformation through sex, ambition, chance, and fame that suddenly and unaccountably lands on someone’s shoulders like a ton of baked lasagna. The picture, a Roman idyll, gently but surely moves back and forth between romantic comedy and satirical farce. Woody Allen’s new movie, “To Rome with Love,” is light and fast, with some of the sharpest dialogue and acting that he’s put on the screen in years.
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