Hihi! I thought I'd do a mid-effort post on this film, as it's a personal favorite of mine. At the end, I'll also be dealing with 2 negative reviews of the film to argue against and bolster my case.

[This 2-part main review is 2500 words long/10 minutes to read. Links marked (V) are video, links unmarked are images. Yes, I have not activated Windows.]

Stardust Memories is a 1980 drama-comedy directed by Woody Allen (whose personal life I won't be going in to, obviously). The film is likely the man's greatest work, and nearly peerless in its experimentalism, philosophy, meta-narrative, portrait of an artist's mind, and was a box-office flop scorned by contemporary reviews. Critics preferred Woody's earlier funny films, and castigated it for its misanthropy and self-centeredness.

It follows the director Sandy Bates (played by Woody Allen) who is in crisis at the film's beginning, wanting to break out of his earlier funny films and into more artistic films, yet is prevented from doing so by his studio executives. The intro scene is from one of Sandy's newer films (V): he is sitting in a train readying to depart, and we are given shots of the other passengers. Many of the extras throughout the film are shot grotesquely, either because they are physically ugly or because the lens distorts them as such. Sandy looks out of his train window and sees a woman on another train kiss her window out to him, and seemingly in a panic, he attempts to escape the train as it begins to depart. While he bangs against his window, a suitcase in the upper luggage compartment spills out the sand it contains , evoking 'sands of time' without the cliche of the hourglass. The train arrives at a landfill, and Sandy discovers that the passengers of the seemingly "upscale" train have ended up in the same place as the "rabble".

While we do not know the context of the scene, the imagery sets up Sandy as a good artist, likely a great one. Of course, the studio execs despise it and think he has lost his mind, preferring his earlier funny films.

"We can take the film away from him, we can re-shoot it, maybe we can salvage something!"

"His films are too fancy. I've seen it all before; they try to document their private suffering and fob it off as art."

"What does he have to suffer for? Doesn't the man realize that he has the greatest gift of all, the gift of laughter?"

The film is eminently quotable, and I only wish I could impart them all to you. These lines do have deeper import, however; Sandy struggles from a lack of meaning in life and feels he should be doing something "more important to the world" than comedies.

The next scene sees Sandy hounded by aides, who want to parade him around the upcoming festival of his films, yet he is distraught:

"I don't want to make funny movies anymore! They can't force me to! Y'know, I-I look around me and all I see is human suffering."

"Human suffering doesn't sell tickets in Kansas City!"

Soon we are introduced to Dorrie (played by Charlotte Rampling), Sandy's current girlfriend. The film's sole flaw is I do not ever want to see Woody Allen kiss another human being. Dorrie has unmedicated bipolar disorder and bouts of psychosis stemming from sexual abuse as a child, and eventually develops anorexia; she is otherwise rather cultured. Their relationship will later end, likely because she thinks Sandy is flirting with her kid cousin at dinner:

"You think I'm flirting with your kid cousin?"

"You can't take your eyes off her!"

"She's sitting opposite me! I smile at her. I'm a friendly person. What do you want? She's a kid! This is stupid!"

"Don't tell me it's stupid! I used to do that with my father, across the table, all those private jokes. I know."

Sandy remains fond for her, however, and slightly obsessed post-breakup.

Throughout the film, he is hounded by fans who, aside from their aforementioned physical grotesqueness, often do not "have their life together". A woman drives across 10 states to break in to his apartment to sleep with him (with a hilarious shirt), men pitch their screenplays to Sandy ("It's a comedy based on that whole Guyana mass suicide!"), hound him for charity efforts & scams, ask for inane autographs ("My mother buys meat from the same butcher your mother does. Can you make it out to 'Phyllis Weinstein, you lying bitch'?") He cannot even have a conversation with Isabelle (played by Marie-Christine Barrault) without constantly being interrupted by them or accepting their gifts, and continual is the repetition of "we love your early, funny films".

Yet another scene is darkly comedic, for when Sandy goes home to visit his sister (who is in the middle of a get-together), he asks why one of the women has a black eye. Her sister says that men recently broke in to her apartment and beat her, robbed her, sexually assaulted her "over and over and over again" -- no one seems to give her any empathy besides Sandy, for they immediately move on to fawning over his celebrity. A man tells Sandy he had 2 heart attacks before he bought an exercise bike, and Sandy asks how many he has had since then. "Two." (As Sandy walks offscreen, we see the man lighting up a cigarette, in a hilariously realistic bit of self-destructive habit.)

Perhaps it's misanthropic, but Stardust Memories has proven prescient with the rise of celebrity culture, and the hardest "stans" tend to be those who have so little going on in their own lives that they leech off others whom they perceive as fuller human beings: this is how Sandy is treated in the film. Not only is the art we see of his quite good, but he is eminently funny & self-aware:

"People think I'm egotistical, but that's just not true. I'm not narcissistic. In fact, if I could be any Greek figure, it would not be Narcissus."

"Who would it be?"

"Zeus."

Or:

"You can't control life. It doesn't wind up perfectly. Only art you can control: art and masturbation. Two areas in which I am an absolute expert."

But particularly damning to the criticism of the film as self-centered is that Sandy does engage with deeper, wider issues than merely his own art. He is approached by an old classmate, who asks why Sandy was successful yet he was not. Sandy observes that he, himself, was lucky to be born in a society that values comedy, as Comanche Indians do not need comedians, and that if he had been born in a WW2 Polish village, "I'd be a lampshade right now. I guess it's just luck, y'know? What can I say, I'm just lucky, it's all luck."

The hilarity of this is that the other guy just happily nods, unaware of what a terrifying truth Sandy has just dropped about life's randomness & success. Sandy is not without his flaws, but he, generally, has it together: the wights who mostly populate the film do not.

Primary to the film is Sandy's conflicts with studio executives, who are attempting to butcher his film. Their edit of the train scene has the 2 trains instead end up in an angelic paradise, where a jazz band plays as they all dance together.

Sandy is pissed:

"The point is it's immoral for you to cut my film. You want them all to go to 'Jazz Heaven' -- what a nitwit idea! The entire point of the film is nobody is saved."

"Sandy, this is an Easter film: we don't need a movie by an atheist!"

"To you I'm an atheist: to God I'm the loyal opposition."

To return to my earlier comment on experimentalism, Stardust Memories focuses deeply on characterization, and does so in non-pareil ways. Walls will often have images projected on to them that illumine a character's mental state, such as here ( when Sandy is being hounded to attend the film festival), and here (with Dorrie). One scene has Sandy attending a festival of his films and walking between lines of fans, yet he looks off, and sees himself as a child. His mother helps him put a cape on, and child-Sandy flies up offscreen, representing his desire to not be here.

There is a night out where he meets a woman, Daisy, and looks onstage to see himself as a child magician; the camera then pans back to his mother & child psychoanalyst in the audience, whose comments make clear Sandy has had neuroticism/perfectionism/fear of failure from a young age. We are shown scenes from Sandy's in-universe comedies, such as a Transylvanian-style movie where he plays a mad scientist who swaps the "immature brain" of a "sexy woman" with the "mature brain" of an "ugly woman", giving him a sexy, mature, wonderful, charming, giving woman.

And then he falls in love with the other one.

[Cont. below.]