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.]
[2/2 of main review.]
Sandy's immaturity with women is skewered at several points, the best example in his conversation with Tony Roberts (played by Tony Roberts) on romance. The first line is Tony:
"You set things up so you can play a little golf, you get a little poon, you smoke some good grass... that's what life's about."
"It's shallow. It's shallow."
"Shallow? Did you see the shallow girl that I'm with? She's very healthy. She won't eat meat, sweets -- just amphetamines. You don't make such good picks, you know. A lot of your picks left a lot to be desired."
"Like what? Like Dorrie? Dorrie was fabulous."
"Dorrie was a loony."
Tony is right, of course, and is the more mature one here -- a rarity for Sandy's position in the film. Despite Tony being a 'shallow' playboy-type character, it is he who has the right idea and maturity, not Sandy.
Now, there is another love interest - Isabelle - but there is unfortunately too little space to discuss her here, and there are many scenes I have not even mentioned, ones that feature striking imagery, metaphor, or blur the line between reality & film even further (such as the scene where Sandy 'sees' his dead mother, revealed to be the actress who played his mother in a recent biopic).
I will instead finish by going through the climax of the film. This is not a film where spoilers matter (I was spoiled even deeper before watching it) but I will spoiler it nonetheless.
Sandy visits a UFO festival with Daisy, a woman from earlier who acts as a parallel to Dorrie; she has her own mental issues and advises Sandy against falling in love with her, advice he of course does not heed. At the festival, we are given again assorted fans: "If there exists alien life, I can prove that they would have a Marxist economy." Brent Spiner (Commander Data!) makes an appearance and tells Sandy: "It's like we're characters in one of your satires being shown in God's private screening room-" before he is mauled by a bear. (Really. The woman who earlier kissed the train's window now reappears, blurring the line between reality & film.
Sandy performs his magic tricks for Daisy, and a crowd composed of his bickering parents, his studio execs:
"If he's such a genius, how come he can't make funny movies?"
"Sandy, we'll sue them if they touch one frame of your film."
His family members & aides:
"Oh, Sandy, you're my brother, you gotta help me fix my life, I'm a mess!"
"Sandy, don't forget that lunch with the editors of that high-school newspaper."
"And what about the Cancer Foundation? And the political prisoners? And the leukemia victims? And the Jews, what about the Jews?"
"All those silly magic tricks you do couldn't help your friend Nate Bernstein!"
Tony Roberts reappears:
"And what about Dorrie? Do you remember the last time you saw her?"
We are shown it. Dorrie was committed to a mental asylum, and speaks to the camera while showing a variety of emotions; spurning ("There's a doctor here who thinks I'm beautiful and interesting."), flirtation ("How do I look?"), depression ("Are you in love with anyone?"), anger ("I can't concentrate!"). Her dialogue is repeatedly jump-cut to metaphorically represent her mind's fragmentation, and it is a devastating scene.
"You were always looking for the perfect woman, and instead you fell in love with me."
It should be noted that however dreamlike the film is, many moments cohere and resonate, precisely because 1) Woody has a talent for picking out small, non-cliched moments and where to place them for the greatest impact, and 2) it never feels forced. Emotion in art cannot be forced, but must come naturally from an organic narrative with well-realized characters, who are often layered in the ways I have listed above in creative fashions.
Next is the alien scene (V). Sandy asks a group of superintelligent aliens on his relationship with Dorrie, and the meaning of life:
"You guys gotta tell me, why is there so much human suffering?"
"This is unanswerable."
"Is there a God?"
"These are the wrong questions!"
"Look, here's my point. If nothing lasts, why am I bothering to make films, or do anything, for that matter?"
"We enjoy your films. Particularly the early, funny ones."
, and if he should stop making movies and do something that matters like helping the blind. They answer:
"Let me tell you, you're not the missionary type. You'd never last. And incidentally, you're also not Superman. You're a comedian. You wanna do mankind a real service? Tell funnier jokes."
Do what you do best, at your best, and don't attempt to make yourself what you aren't: things will proceed much smoother from there. This is one of the most sage bits of advice put to screen, and how naturally it is put only greatens it.
Finishing up the film are two final standout moments. The first is here and is remembered by Sandy after he is shot by a fan (this was released only a year before John Lennon was shot), and is a poetic moment recognizable to anyone who has ever lived with a lover.
The final scene shows Sandy & Isabelle on the train from the intro scene of the film, and it is revealed, as the projector dims, that this entire film has been the creation of Sandy Bates, who is applauded by the room of his fans & characters we have just seen from the 'film' itself. But this is no saccharine happy ending: the audience speaks with each other, and while his fans have loved it, few seem to understand the film's actual depth. They talk about trite messages they took about it like "everybody love everybody", and the women gossip over how annoying Sandy was in kissing scenes. None seem to realize what has just been imparted to them, philosophically, yet they all leave, and only Sandy is left as the lights in the room dim and he looks back at the projector while the film ends.
[This response to negative criticism of the film is 2000 words long/5-10 minutes. Apologies for how long this is; I really did want to be very thorough.]
That said, I'd like to address the negative reception of the film (currently at 68% on RT) to play off their arguments and bolster my own case. I will be using Ray Carney's general review of Woody Allen http://people.bu.edu/rcarney/carncult/woody.shtml and Roger Ebert's 2/4 star review of Stardust Memories, beginning with Carney.
In Stardust Memories, Allen's comic exaggerations ensure that the freaks stay freaks. Since they have no practical identities, no expressive particularity, no authentic humanity, they can't be feared or hated. Their weirdness stays in the side-show category, instead of being allowed to become more human and more believable, allowed to become more disturbing to the central character or to the film's audiences.
This is true to an extent, but Carney assumes that the film intends for the freaks to be more than freaks, then criticizes it for not living up to the external standard he has set upon it. Should one criticize John Wick for its lack of existentialism? One of the film's major points is that the grotesques who admire Sandy (even as they are not even fully cognizant of their reasons for doing so, seen in the ending wherein they love the film without understanding one iota) and leech off of him because he does, despite his neuroses, "have his life together": they do not. (As an aside, as a fan of his films, I never found it mean-spirited because I am not a freak who breaks in to celebrities' apartments to sleep with them.)
Carney earlier castigates the film for not being more misanthropic and skewering them, which aside from ignoring that they are not the focus, Sandy is, what left can be done with these sadsacks but laughing at them? I don't think the film would be particularly bettered if Sandy scolded the guy killing himself through smoking despite his 4 heart attacks. It reminds me of a review of 12 Years A Slave that scorned that great film for not "focusing more on the little girl Patsy", ignoring that the reason the film follows Solomon and not Patsy is because Solomon is 1) the far more interesting/compelling character and 2) is constructed much more vividly both in his internal tapestry and in the events he witnesses.
And it's the same with Sandy Bates.
Similarly, the freaks in Stardust Memories are more abstract representations of Sandy's anxieties, than real characters in his life. They tell us how harried he is and how preyed upon by self-doubt.
The only scene this could possibly apply to is the UFO festival scene, which I listed above, but I have otherwise dealt with this, and the ending similarly decimates this argument. Sandy mostly dismisses the fans in-film.
The epiphany near the end of Stardust Memories is repeated in one form or another in film after film generally in their concluding moments. As is usual at such moments, the character played by Woody Allen speaks sentiments that are clearly endorsed by Woody Allen the filmmaker:
Before we continue: "deep characters say things the artist themselves think is deep" is not the burn Carney thinks it is.
SANDY: I was reaching for something to give my life meaning and a memory flashed through my mind.... It was one of those great spring days. It was Sunday, and you knew summer would be coming soon. I remember that morning Dorrie and I had gone for a walk in the park. We came back to the apartment. We were just sort of sitting around. And I put on a record of Louis Armstrong, which is music that I grew up loving. It was very, very pretty, and I happened to glance over, and I saw Dorrie sitting there. And I remember thinking to myself how terrific she was, and how much I loved her. And, I don't know, I guess it was the combination of everything. . . the sound of the music, and the breeze, and how beautiful Dorrie looked to me. And for one brief moment everything just seemed to come together perfectly, and I felt happy. Almost indestructible in a way. It's funny that that simple little moment of contact moved me in a very, very profound way.
This is essentially the dream of a Pateresque connoisseur. It's "Complacencies of the peignoir, and late / Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair," but without any of the bracing Stevensian ironies. Allen's formulation makes the cultivation of an exquisite sensibility the "meaning" of life. Allen's work not only tolerates, but favors such releases from dramatic interaction and relationship for a character.
It's utterly incorrect to claim that a scene that shows a moment of love & beauty of a character with an ex-girlfriend (who is now committed to a psychiatric ward after suffering bipolar disorder, anorexia, psychosis), and one in the smallest of moments (yet in a way where I myself immediately recognized it from my own life) is somehow divorced from "dramatic interaction" and "relationship for a character". This is no high-falutin' thing one needs several degrees to understand, so the "cultivation of exquisite sensibility" accusation is off-base, unless one believes that the playing off small moments & images in life and deepening them through metaphor, allegory or parallax is indicative of such. Like an elderly man who cannot hear certain sounds, Carney is so clueless to the higher frequencies the film operates on that he does not realize the film has much deep dramatic interaction, relationship, and dialogue.
To more thoroughly refute this claim, however, let me go back earlier in Carney's review and his artistic sensibilities.
He criticizes another Woody film, Hannah and Her Sisters, for a vicious argument between a wife & husband where they "make accusations of one another, air out their dirty laundry", says it is unrealistic that "nothing much comes of it".
This is a rather revealing line of Carney's, for it shows he has never been in a relationship where you constantly bicker with your partner, yet go to bed with every night and wake up to another shitty day with them, usually pulled along by the promise of 'higher' points even as you mostly cannot stand being around them. These are zomboid relationships one shambles within for months, and they exist in reality, yet Carney would prefer it lead to a melodramatic divorce even when it often does not in reality. Similarly he scolds Annie Hall for the hilarious scene where Woody sneezes in to a line of cocaine rather than going down the cliche-rife route of drug addiction (and incorrectly claims the film 'wants credit for dealing with serious issues', which seems more projection than anything).
So, that a drama's action is primarily internal than external does not diminish it as drama one iota, if well-wrought. (And the scene he cites is not a good example for his case, anyway.)
That is why Sandy's meaning for life exists not in terms of the play of dialogue or interaction between characters, but strictly as a self-absorbed soliloquy spoken by the writer, director, and star of the film.
He says, after directly quoting a scene in which Sandy is cogitating on a past memory that is an interaction and expression of romance between two characters (for Dorrie realizes him watching her, and smiles back at him), while listening to a song the two enjoy while in the other's presence, one he remembers from his childhood. Was it self-absorbed when Mark Twain said that life is primarily the storm of thoughts brewing in oneself at any particular time, which includes re-examining past memories? Sandy Bates recognizes that the cosmos & life is a random thing with no particular order or structure, and that it is incumbent on humans to imbue it with meaning, which he does so via this memory and in his artistic work.
First, if Allen's films were more truly dramatic, in the sense in which I am saying they fail to be, their own narrative structure would prevent such an abstract "meaning" from congealing within them; and, second, it would prevent one from taking this passage as "straight" and uncritically as Allen obviously wants a viewer to take it.
What exactly forces a viewer to "take it straight"? It's what the character thinks. You can't say it isn't what the character thinks, you can only disagree with what it means. I suppose his criticism here is that Woody is too abstract, which ignores that there are several concrete moments within the film about life's randomness, the role of luck, love, and of course "tell funnier jokes." In fact, given Woody's reputation as the most literary director, he is one of my favorites precisely because I can (as a prose writer) concretely explain his works' greatness, whereas something like Bergman's Persona is so abstract I can only recognize its greatness yet not articulate it.
This isn't even mentioning how, as a general critique, Woody's later film "Crimes & Misdemeanors" decimates all of this, for it has an even more Shakespearean sense of concrete meaning, and which I may review after this (as it's more grokkable/leftist).
Lastly, he later castigates Woody for "shallowly" referring to other works of art, and quotes Sandy Bates alongside... Ike, from Manhattan, who is a self-loathing narcissistic pedophile, a terrible writer who pretends at depth, smacks his child, and attempts to run over his wife because she had a lesbian affair. Contrast that to all I've imparted to you about Sandy Bates, and you'll realize the comparison is ludicrous.
On to Ebert's 2/4 stars, and the final part of the review! https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/stardust-memories-1980
He clearly intends “Stardust Memories” to be his “8 1/2,” and it develops as a portrait of the artist's complaints.
No real issue with this line, but from what I've read about 8 1/2 (which the film responds to), Stardust Memories seems vastly superior in the same way that Crimes & Misdemeanors was a response to Crime & Punishment yet was also vastly superior to.
The subjects blend into the basic complaint of the Woody Allen persona we have come to know and love, and can be summarized briefly: If I'm so famous and brilliant and everybody loves me, then why doesn't anybody in particular love me?
Given what I have expounded above, does anyone think this is a good summary of the film or of Sandy's character? Sandy's primary crisis in the film is not one of 'finding love', it's that studio execs are attempting to butcher his film and he has a fear of artistic failure: one of the best traits an artist can have.
Fine, except what else does Allen have to say about [the fans]? Nothing.
This is again not what the film is trying to do with them. Roger also comments that in 8 1/2 the fans/aides make calls on the main character's humanity, whereas they don't in Stardust Memories. Ok: so what? That's why they're different films, Roger.
But the Allen character expresses only impotence, despair, uncertainty, discouragement. All through the film, Allen keeps talking about diseases, catastrophes, bad luck that befalls even the most successful. Yes, but that's what artists are for: to hurl their imagination, joy, and conviction into the silent maw. Sorry if I got a little carried away. “Stardust Memories” inspires that kind of frustration, though, because it's the first Woody Allen film in which impotence has become the situation rather than the problem. This is a movie about a guy who has given up.
The despair Sandy expresses is already mediated through his struggles against, again, the studio executives who are suppressing his great artistry (which we already see exists due to 1- the intro scene of the film and 2- the film itself). He argues with them several times and resists them; if anything he is annoyed, frustrated, not discouraged. He already knows he is capable of making great art if allowed to, the uncertainty is simply whether he should be doing that or something more important, as he says in the conversation with the aliens. And of course, the ending of the film disproves any claim of 'impotence' on Sandy's part; his pride reminds me of Melville, who maintained up until he died that the scorned Moby-Dick was the rightfully great work it is. That is power, not impotence.
For a last bit of meta-narrative: Woody Allen (who, to be fair, has never been the best at interpreting his own work) still says Stardust Memories is his best film, and he's correct for all the reasons I've stated above.
Whew. Anyway, this post slightly got away from me and was longer than I intended; if you've actually read this, thanks, I mostly did it to help myself analyze the film.
What do you think of Deconstructing Harry? Kind of a repeat of this one, in the same way that Match Point was a retread of Crimes and Misdemeanors. Despite having another all-time great film as its basis (Wild Strawberries) there's much less philosophy and experimentalism, and although I think I've seen it more times than I've seen Stardust Memories, it's certainly a weaker film. Many of the "short stories" it presents are excellent, however (Robin Williams as the out-of-focus actor, Death arrives for a man who's housesitting, etc.), and I do like the device of the short story serving the purpose of the memories / dream sequences of Wild Strawberries.
Plus it has one of my favorite lines - "You're the opposite of paranoid. You have this insane delusion that people like you."
Anyway, even if Deconstructing Harry may not ultimately compare, I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on whether or not the characterization of the protagonist there says anything new or if it accentuates anything he'd previously attempted in Stardust Memories. Maybe the comparison is a superficial one, I dunno . . . been a while since I've seen either film.
. . . many moments cohere and resonate, precisely because 1) Woody has a talent for picking out small, non-cliched moments and where to place them for the greatest impact, and 2) it never feels forced.
This is what I love so much about the lobster scenes, and the differences between them, in Annie Hall.
![RowPin Reviews: Stardust Memories (1980) [Not the Gundam one!]](https://i.imgur.com/4fcKrap.png){kind=link}
