The fully mature Woody Allen in one of his playful moods. Certainly the subject-matter in itself could not be found to be too light. Loss of self in a relationship, loss of values, complacency, idleness -- these are topics which no Argus-eyed moralist would want to sneeze at. It's the treatment of them that pumps in the helium. A pampered Manhattan housewife ("I've become one of those women who shops all day and gets pedicures"), complaining of minor lower-back pain, visits a recommended acupuncturist and herbalist in Chinatown. Dr. Yang, a figure precisely as grounded in real life as the Chinese shopkeeper at the start of Gremlins, finds nothing wrong with her back, and prescribes instead a program of self-realization facilitated by packets of unspecified rare herbs. These make a concrete reality of such childhood fantasies as invisibility, flying, and -- that more adolescenthood fantasy -- the love potion. The anything-goes nature of this program (if the heroine wants to try her hand at writing, she will be attended by a personal Muse with laurel in her hair) cuts two ways. However much it might sabotage the seriousness of the issues raised, it at the same time creates short-cuts, or secret passageways, into those issues -- and it does so with a casualness and a candidness that do no harm to Allen's repute as the "personal" type of filmmaker. The trouble with all this is not at all that Allen doesn't probe the deep questions deeply; it's that he doesn't probe the flippancies deeply. The use of invisibility, for example, as a means of eavesdropping on two friends at Ralph Lauren's -- or, if you're a man, as a means of following a world-famous fashion model into the dressing room -- is a good place to start. But then where to? Inevitably a ghost or a Muse or a something else comes along in a minute, for a new diversion and a new direction. Nothing is stayed with for long. To say it a blunter way: the trouble is not that Allen doesn't take the reality seriously; it's that he doesn't take the fantasy seriously. That might be all right for the man who prefers to spend all his viewing hours watching democracy-in-action on C-SPAN, but it's not all right for the man who chooses voluntarily to write and direct a fantasy. Mia Farrow, Joe Mantegna, William Hurt. (1990) — Duncan Shepherd
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