Stardust Memories

by Nick Lohr

Coming off the one-two punch of Annie Hall and Manhattan, I can’t imagine how difficult it must be to follow-up such films with something as polarizing as Stardust Memories. It is a jarring film, due not only to the ongoing parade of strange characters, fragmented editing, and imaginative detours, but also the common interpretation that this was Allen’s personal response to stardom. Woody plays Sandy Bates, an award-winning filmmaker who found fame with a series of early comedies and is met with resistance to his recent serious films. “Doesn’t he realize he has the greatest gift anyone could ever ask for— the gift of laughter!” opines a critic in an early scene. But Sandy has no interest in being funny. “They can’t make me,” he says. “I look around and all I see is suffering.” This is the film that coined the phrase Allen critics, including myself, are guilty of over-using by referring to his “early funny movies” as several characters tell Sandy just how much they miss them. He reluctantly agrees to attend a weekend seminar celebrating his film career, while flashbacks of his previous relationships mingle with the happenings of the festival. Sandy’s imagination is the driving-force of the picture as his mind continues to unravel, recalling visions of his childhood performing magic tricks for the family, his complicated but heated relationship with the troubled Dorrie, flirtations with the caring but spoken-for Daisy, and his tumultuous times with Isobel. “What I wanted to show, as I do in so many of my films, was man’s relationship to his mortality,” says Allen in his career-spanning interview with Stig Bjorkman, Woody Allen on Woody Allen.

Early in the film, Sandy’s cook nearly burns down the apartment while preparing rabbit for dinner. His gaze locks onto the dead rabbit. “And then the rest of the film takes place in his mind,” Woody explains. With the majority of the film occupying the mind of a character, the film is free to play with the constructs of time and place. In addition, it lends the picture some interpretive wiggle-room as one is left to consider if these are Sandy’s accurate recollections, his wishes of what might’ve been, or something else entirely. After a series of vignettes, exploring his relationships with three women, scenes from his films, and the weekend away, Sandy is shot by a fan only to return and accept a posthumous award in-person before the festival crowd. As I said, it is a jarring film, difficult to digest and complex in its execution. “It took six months to shoot. It was a complicated film to do, because it was extremely well-orchestrated,” says Allen. “It was just a hard film to do.”

There’s no doubt balancing these many threads must be difficult, but Allen manages to pull-off such a daring form of storytelling with style, though I challenge anyone to find a review of the film that doesn’t mention Allen’s visual influences like Fellini’s 8 1/2. “By the time I made Stardust Memories, I felt that the medium was more in my control,” he says. When reading anything about the film, it quickly becomes apparent that many critics and viewers were put-off by Allen’s portrayal of fame and fans. Throughout Stardust Memories, Sandy is constantly accosted by strange-faced admirers badgering him for autographs, help with charities and causes, to look at some headshots, read a script, or lend money. One crazed fan breaks into his hotel room, waiting in bed with hash brownies and offers of empty sex while another shoots him because he’s his “biggest fan.” Even more upsetting is the way many characters speak directly to the camera, we see the world through Sandy’s eyes, as they hurl praise at the viewer like some kind of doting Hannibal Lector. Many feel it is Allen’s way of expressing disdain for fans and critics alike. However, he asserts otherwise.

“I can understand that certain segments of the population would do that. But I would think differently of the more educated critics and the more sophisticated audience. They confuse the character you play with who you are. I’ve never been the character I’ve played. There are some simulate traits, but it’s not me,” says Woody. Such reception is the filmmaker’s greatest lament regarding the picture. The similarities between Sandy and Woody are easy to find— apart from the names being so alike. Both film careers mirror one another, even scenes from Sandy’s fake films shown during the festival look like something straight out of Allen’s filmography. “One marvelous sequence, in which police with dogs pursue Sidney Finkelstein’s escaped “hostility” – a massive, hairy beast briefly glimpsed assaulting Sidney’s mother – looks like a long-cherished idea too outrageous to fit even the loose structure of a Take the Money and Run,” writes Nick Roddick in his 1980 review for the Times Literary Supplement.

The arguments over whether or not this was Allen’s expression of his frustrations as a celebrity are missing the point, particularly getting bogged down in Woody’s instance to the contrary. I follow the same philosophy as John Greco of Twenty-four Frames that, “As a rule one should believe the art and not the artist.” Whether I believe Allen’s assertion that this was entirely fiction and similarities are pure coincidence doesn’t change the content of the film. Furthermore, I’m going to take anything he says with a degree of skepticism because what Woody has to say, as an artist, is in the film itself and what’s said outside of it is of less importance for my particular reading and enjoyment of it. If anything, I think the failures of the film lie less in whether or not it’s autobiographical and more in the way it conveys the greater theme of mortality.

Sandy is often questioning his purpose in life. He’s had success but it, like all of existence, is fleeting. His films will be gone one day as will everything from Shakespeare to all matter in the universe. However, for all his questioning, the film doesn’t take enough of a step toward offering a satisfying intellectual resolution. “It’s the first Woody Allen film in which impotence has become the situation rather than the problem,” writes Roger Ebert. “It needs some larger idea, some sort of organizing force, to pull together all these scenes of bitching and moaning, and make them lead somewhere.” There is a scene, late in the film where Sandy takes stock of a good moment. His favorite record is playing, his beautiful girlfriend is there, the weather is just right, and he simply enjoys it. Maybe that’s enough, he wonders. One can’t help all of those who are suffering but if they can manage to be a moral person, live an honest life, and appreciate the good times, maybe that’s the best thing we’ve got. The scene is effective in conveying an idea he’ll return to in films like Whatever Works, the notion that we’re here and yes there is suffering but maybe the little good moments are enough to get us through life. The issue with these themes and methods in Stardust Memories is they’ve have been done in previous Allen films with greater success.

Critic Janet Maslin for The New York Times:

Sandy has a great deal in common with other characters Mr. Allen has played, most notably Alvy Singer of ”Annie Hall,” but the character this time seems imbued with an intentional weariness. So many scenes here serve as pale echoes of ”Annie Hall” that the effect is overpoweringly sad. As Alvy chased lobsters around his kitchen, Sandy chases a pigeon. Sandy gets sick to his stomach under stress, just as Alvy did. His confidant about his troubles with women is Tony Roberts once again, and when the film students speak up, they’re photographed in a style that recalls Alvy’s grade-school classmates in their schoolroom. And Sandy is still asking the same big questions Alvy asked, about what life is for and whether it’s possible to love anyone. He’s still not getting any answers.

Likewise, an artist coming to grips with the fact that their work will not grant them the kind of eternal life they really seek has already been portrayed so brilliantly by Diane Keaton in Interiors. “I would trade that Oscar for one more second of life,” Sandy says after being shot. Art not saving the artist is a common theme for Allen. It seems strange I could follow up these issues by saying Stardust Memories is actually one of my favorite Woody Allen films. Amidst all of Sandy’s existential concerns are some really great lines that are funny in a purely Woody Allen way. (“It’s crazy, the town is jammed. I don’t know, is the Pope in town, or some other show business figure?”) It also continues his trend of writing thoughtful, believable, female characters for the screen. It’s a masterfully-crafted film that manages to juggle a complex, non-linear story. Most striking, however, is the photography of Gordon Willis. Like Manhattan, there are a number of shots that really take the viewer by surprise with how dense they are— just absolutely packed with character. I’d much rather see an artist try something bold like this film, even if every element is not a complete success. Many artists balk at experimenting like this for fear of failure. For Woody, doing so many films has given him the wonderful freedom to fail. “I’ve tried very hard to make my films into a non-event. I just want to work, that’s all,” he says. “Just put the film out for people to see, just keep grinding them out. I hope I’ll have a long and healthy life, that I can keep working all the time, and that I can look back in old age and say, ‘I made fifty movies and some of them were excellent and some of them were not so good and some were funny.’” I would not include Stardust Memories in the “not so good” category because, for me, it’s always represented a successful experimentation. It dares to try. “Stardust Memories is one of those purgatorial artistic journeys,” writes Neil Sinyard in The Films of Woody Allen. “It seemed to represent the culmination for Allen of his cinema of self-revelation.” Like the scene Sandy notices is a purely good moment in his life, Stardust Memories is full of good things that you shouldn’t let pass by unnoticed.