A Comic Master Goes for Baroque

By RICHARD CORLISS

STARDUST MEMORIES Directed and Written by Woody Allen

From the outside, celebrity means receiving invitations to all the best parties, swapping aperc,us with the noterati and finding beautiful women draped around your calves begging for a one-night meaningful experience. From the inside--of Woody Allen's head--celebrity is all of this, and ain't it awful? It means being introduced to a woman who wrote "the definitive cinematic study of Gummo Marx." It means being offered unproducible scripts, including a musical-comedy treatment of the Guyana massacre. It means being solicited to join committees for Soviet dissidents, to help stamp out leukemia, to donate a personal item to a celebrity auction for the blind ("Somebody told me you wear a truss. An old truss would be just wonderful"). It means being asked to sit for an interview on "the shallow indifference of wealthy celebrities." And everywhere there are autograph freaks. A young woman asks, "Would you sign my left breast?" He does. A man shoves a piece of paper in his face and says, "Could you just write 'To Phyllis Weinstein--you unfaithful lying bitch'?" He escapes the mob for a drive on a deserted road with a pretty girl and, naturally, his Rolls-Royce overheats.

Stardust Memories is Woody Allen's 8 1/2.Taking his cue from Federico Fellini's great comic fantasy, Allen has set his film in a resort hotel and cast himself as a film maker, very much like the Woody Allen we think we know, who finds himself in a creative culdesac. The film mixes memory and fantasy with the surreal-life present. Its visual style is a gloss on 8 1/2's: seductive black-and-white images, express-train pacing, a foregrounding of comic bit players. The three main women in 8 1/2 (a mistress, a wife, an earthy guardian angel) find their echoes here in Charlotte Rampling, Marie-Christine Barrault and Jessica Harper. Allen also appropriates Fellini's strategy of deflecting criticism by placing it in his film--in the mouths of buffoons. Predators and editors, gargoyles and groupies, all want a piece of his present and a lock on his future--his promise to make the kind of romantic comedies that established his cult, which for him means a return to the played-out past. He rejects this advice, but he can't escape it. He even dreams of encountering an extraterrestrial who tells him: "You want to do mankind a real service? Tell funnier jokes."

The film's comic tone, however, is as deadpan as that of a New Yorker profile. The interested-disinterested camera follows its subject for a few days, records snippets of conversation, refuses to strain for socko punch lines or an apocalyptic climax. As an ironic True Confessions, the film may satisfy the benign curiosity millions of people seem to have about Woody Allen. The star of cover stories in virtually every major magazine has now written and directed his own. It is the story of his life and his films, a defense of a public artist's need for privacy, an explanation of his motives for making the solemnly metaphysical Interiors, and a cardiogram showing the latest murmurs of his heart. As a lover and friend, he can never quite satisfy his women. As a film maker, he can shower them with cinematic gifts: a final close-up for Rampling, a final kiss for Barrault, the film's final shot in which he retrieves Harper's sunglasses. He can control their destinies and make them happy.

"You can't control life," says Woody Allen in Stardust Memories. "It doesn't wind up perfectly. Only art you can control. Art and masturbation--two areas in which I'm an absolute expert." Some moviegoers will see the film as life made into art, the rarefied atmosphere of Manhattan high life bottled, aged and served with a chill. Others will wonder if the movie isn't an elaborate mechanism of self-abuse, a Rube Goldberg dildo, a film about a dead end that is a dead end for this prolific, personal film maker. Stardust Memories has much to please the eye and ear. Cinematographer Gordon Willis and Production Designer Mel Bourne have created an austere, bleached environment that gives Allen's film a look as distinctive as a Bergman or Fellini film--or, rather, a Bergman and a Fellini film. And there are enough quotable gags to fill a movie review, if not a weekend seminar at a resort hotel. But there is also a sense of aridity, of desperation.

Traditionally, artists begin their careers by imitating their masters and gradually developing or refining a style that in the happiest cases becomes unique. In recent American films, though, the process has been reversed. Hot young directors like Steven Spielberg and John Landis have exercised their talent on elaborate homages to the Three Stooges. Brian De Palma has taken up permanent residence as a grinning caretaker of the Hitchcock reliquary. Paul Mazursky has stared into his navel and found Franc,ois Truffaut. And Woody Allen, whose films find their strength in reflections on his life and the lives of the beautiful battered people around him, has retreated into an anguished remake of 8 1/2. In Stardust Memories, he has erected a movie-studio cage around his experience and produced pictures of his bars and his keepers.

Because Woody Allen, like Fellini, has an acute sense of the absurd, he can see as much humor in his own splintered isolation as he can in the clumsy attempts of outsiders to break into the cage, to crash the cocktail party inside his head. Stardust Memories is a schizoid invitation to that party. The card says: COME ONE, COME ALL. BRING YOUR OWN BOOS. And in a fine hand at the bottom you can read: TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT.

--By Richard Corliss

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