To Rome with Love (2012)
Directed by Woody Allen
Four tales unfold in the Eternal City: While vacationing in Rome, architect John encounters a young man whose romantic woes remind him of a painful incident from his own youth; retired opera director Jerry discovers a mortician with an amazing voice, and he seizes the opportunity to rejuvenate his own flagging career; a young couple have separate romantic interludes; a spotlight shines on an ordinary man.
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The film’s Italian-language segments play like vague retreads of Fellini (one of Allen’s favourite directors) – the paparazzi swarming Benigni’s character are straight out of “La Dolce Vita”, while the country couple led astray by big-city temptation is a nod to the Italian director’s first film, “The White Sheik” – only without the wit, lyricism and undercurrent of despair.
The four disconnected stories in the film seem at moments to nod to the Italian New Wave (if more to Fellini's popular La Dolce Vita than to Antonioni's internal L'Avventura), but never in a way that feels particularly thought through.
Alec Baldwin's advice-giving phantom recalls Bogie in Allen's "Play It Again, Sam"; Penélope Cruz's kooky hooker resembles characters in "You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger" and "Mighty Aphrodite"; and Benigni's everyman stalked by paparazzi is a shoutout to Fellini's "La Dolce Vita."
"Paparazzi" is an Italian word derived from a photographer's name in Federico Fellini's "La Dolce Vita."
Now, in To Rome with Love, he naturally highlights the Colosseum and the Spanish Steps; and in a more resonant moment, he shows us a flirting couple at the Fontana di Trevi, where Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg splashed about in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, more than 50 years ago.
The four disconnected stories in the film seem at moments to nod to the Italian New Wave (if more to Fellini's popular La Dolce Vita than to Antonioni's internal L'Avventura), but never in a way that feels particularly thought through.
Allen previously visited England with "Match Point" and Spain with "Vicky Cristina Barcelona," and last year's "Midnight in Paris" was his most commercially successful film ever.
Continuing his cinematic tour of Europe, encompassing “Match Point,” “Scoop,” “Vicky Cristina Barcelona,” and “Midnight in Paris,” among other diversions, writer/director Woody Allen arrives in Italy, where his ensemble cast courts anthology-style adventure and romance.
And like his last film, 2011's successful "Midnight in Paris," this playful, seductive exercise in head-over-heels romance, overnight fame and unexplained time travel is a rewarding, entertaining confection.
Once thought of as that most quintessential of New York-based filmmakers--a director who wouldn't leave the Five Boroughs even if you held him at gunpoint--Woody Allen has, with the exception of 2009's "Whatever Works," spent the last few years on a cinematic tour of Europe that has seen dispatches from England ("Match Point," "Scoop," "Cassandra's Dream" and "You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger"), Spain ("Vicky Cristina Barcelona") and France ("Midnight in Paris").
Apparently, Sony Pictures Classics doesn't want to risk alienating the customers who made last year's " Midnight in Paris " a surprise breakout hit ($151 million at the worldwide box office) and the most popular film in Woody Allen's five-decade career as a writer-director.
It comes with much of the lightness and love for one of Europe's great cities that made last year's "Midnight in Paris" so charming but little of the intellectual and emotional rigor that ultimately turned that film into something magical.
Hayley (Alison Pill, "Midnight in Paris," "Goon") is an American tourist in Rome for the summer who stops Michelangelo (Flavio Parenti, "I Am Love") for directions to the Trevi fountain.