I thought this was supposed to be a comedy. That was the most horrifying thing I've ever seen.
Two years after his Ingmar Bergman simulacrum Interiors, Woody Allen made his first genuine drama with 1980's Stardust Memories. (Manhattan has its serious moments, but I would still primarily classify it as a comedy.) Channeling his inner Fellini, Allen uses every trick in his arsenal and, along with cinematographer Gordon Willis and editor Susan E. Morse, forges some new ones to tell the story of depressive director Sandy Bates, whose studio is freaking out because he just delivered his most downbeat, arty, and frankly uncommercial film after a string of well-received, hugely successful comedies. While the nervous executives (whose ranks include an uncredited Laraine Newman) exhort him to soften his ending and his scatterbrained secretary (an uncredited Louise Lasser) fails to keep his schedule straight, Sandy heads off to a film retrospective where he is to be the guest of honor, fielding asinine questions (occasionally alongside his frequent co-star, played by his frequent co-star Tony Roberts) and fending off his overzealous fans. What Sandy has on his mind the most, though, are the various women in (and out of) his life.
Foremost among them is troubled actress Dorrie (Charlotte Rampling), his one-time leading lady both on and off the screen whose emotional instability spelled doom for their personal and professional relationships. She is so much in his thoughts, in fact -- as evidenced by the fact that she's the subject of the first of his many waking reveries -- that Sandy doesn't blink when he finds her counterpart in neurotic violinist Daisy (Jessica Harper), who's there with her husband, a screenwriting professor who, like most of the weekend's attendees, wants something from him. Lastly, there's his current lover, Isobel (Marie-Christine Barrault), a Frenchwoman with two young children who represents the kind of sane, stable woman he's resisted settling down with all these years. Even when Isobel comes out to visit him, having been summoned by the overwhelmed Sandy, it's Daisy that he takes to a repertory screening of The Bicycle Thief that just happens to be playing in town, and she's also the one with him when his car breaks down and they come upon a gathering of UFO freaks who are indistinguishable from the ones at the film festival just down the road. It's telling, though, that he's all alone when he has his close encounter with the aliens who tell him how best to serve his fellow man. Naturally, this is another one of his fantasies, as is his paranoid delusion that he's been shot by one of his crazed fans, which eerily predicts John Lennon's assassination just a few months after the film's release. The subsequent reveal that Sandy won his Academy Award for literally playing God -- in spite of his voice being dubbed -- is perhaps the best joke in a film that hasn't been too concerned with making them. Just goes to show that Allen wasn't as convinced as Sandy that the road to profundity could only paved in portentous pronouncements.
Incidentally, for those keeping score at home, Stardust Memories was the film I watched exactly ten years ago when I decided to start posting reviews of the movies I watched to my LiveJournal. Now, 3,624 reviews later, I've circled back to the one that started it all. I hope I did it justice this time.