From Rome with Love

From Rome with Love, Woody Allen's latest foray into European adoration after last year's Midnight in Paris, channels the Spanish juggernaut of surrealist cinema, Luis Bunuel. In his Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, three middle-class French couples try to meet for dinner but are perpetually and absurdly interrupted each time – by a monsignor, by an army. In The Exterminating Angel, guests at a dinner party are unable to leave after finishing their last course. They are not held by bars or guards but by an invisible force. In Bunuel's films, we read in the cultural significance where the director has repeatedly claimed there is none. The figures in Bourgeoisie may kindle thoughts in the viewer about the diddling around of the self-fulfilling (and selfish) lifestyles of the well-cultured. Angel's characters may be bound not by physical constraints but by ideology or cultural forces which we do not see.

In Allen's film, Roberto Benigni plays a middle-class Roman who wakes up one day to find throngs of reporters outside his door. They ask him what he had for breakfast and his thoughts about the weather while young women clamor for his signature. He is the mediocre man suddenly made significant. In one particularly memorable scene he is brought onto a news program to share his thoughts on the most mundane of life's activities. He is scrutinized from every angle until, suddenly, one day, the press's attention shifts to another man walking down the street who “looks much more interesting.” Benigni is saddened and shares a pathetic scene with his wife when he hounds passersby to recognize him and ask for his daily forecast.

In another Bunuelian moment, a middle-aged mortician is thrust into the classical singing world by a retired director, played by Allen himself. The mortician's gift, however, is confined to the shower, and during an audition he fails to impress. Allen decides that in subsequent performances, the singer will be allowed his natural habitat. A mobile shower is constructed, and the mortician performs magnificently on stage in front of hundreds, all the while scrubbing his back and lathering his beard.

Another thread of the film follow Jesse Eisenberg, a young architecture student, as he slowly falls in love with his girlfriend's visiting friend. Alec Baldwin is the flourish – a semi-omniscient devil-on-the-shoulder to Eisenberg – who is recognized by all characters but somehow external to the world of the characters in the love triangle. The final stream involves a newly married couple from the Italian countryside who come to Rome to make their fortune. They get separated, the husband becomes involved with a voluptuous prostitute (Penelope Cruz), and the wife sleeps with a burglar after nearly bedding a movie star. Neither of these pieces are as compellingly surreal as the former. Baldwin's character and his presence is half-baked, and the couples comedy lacks the absurd magic of the other segments.

I am struggling with a summation of what I saw, but I enjoyed it. The film was cheerfully absurd and, in the Bunuel tradition, I must deny my impulse to interpret it.