(1992; b/w) Using a pastiche of film influences with comic juxtapositions, writer/director Woody Allen conjures up a strange, transforming night. Philosophically funny, mixing together and parodying elements from Ingmar Bergman, Orson Welles, and Fellini, while adding music from Kurt Weill into a Kafkaesque narrative, the meta-movie opens with two men struggling in a dark and foggy scene.

A vigilante gang wakes Max Kleinman (Woody Allen), informing him that the maniac murderer has struck again, strangling the night watchman. Anxious to know the plan and his assignment, the nebbish Max fearfully goes outside, leaving behind Sophie, his landlady (who urges him to marry her and quit his job); but the citizen patrol has vanished.

Inside a circus trailer Irmy the sword swallower (Mia Farrow) complains to her lover, Paul the clown (John Malkovich), of wanting to get married, have a baby, and settle down; he, however, speaks of needing his freedom "to make people laugh," insisting that "a family is death to the artist." Outside and upset, he goes to see the voluptuous acrobat (who's married to the strong man); Irmy barges in on them and then in a fit of fury and despair departs.

In the doctor's lab with covered corpses as in a coroner's office, Max listens to the medical scientist (Donald Pleasance) dismiss spiritual and religious beliefs in his search for the origins of evil.

On the creepy street, Irmy encounters a prostitute (Lily Tomlin), who takes the circus girl back with her to the whorehouse. When the other girls (including Jodie Foster and Kathy Bates) hear that Irmy swallows swords, one retorts: "That's my specialty too." During a discussion of the differences between love and sex, an academic and client, Jack (John Cusack), offers Irmy $700 to go to bed with him. Afterward when she says she feels changed, not like herself, he says: "Not like you, or was it the real you for the first time?"

The murderer (Michael Kirby) pursues the doctor, still puzzling over where sanity ends and evil begins. Inside the police station, Max snitches a glass on which he'd left his fingerprints from when he was in the doctor's lab; cops bring in Irmy, suspected of prostitution. After paying a $50 fine, Irmy and Max leave the station together before the vigilante Hacker (David Ogden Stiers) confronts them; together they catch Mr Paulson, Max's boss, being a peeping tom.

Meanwhile, Paul enters a bar while searching for Irmy but instead meets Jack, who describes his extraordinary lovemaking with a female sword swallower, saying the girl's lover, "some poor clown," hadn't serviced her well.

Asking Max to give the rest of her money to the church for her, Irmy, wearing a big hat and carrying a valise, wonders if having given herself for money to "Just one person, does that make me a whore?" Soon afterward the pair come upon a poor widow with an infant, inspiring Irmy to request Max to retrieve half the money from the church to give to the woman. Following Max's fiancée's refusal to allow Irmy permission to sleep on her couch, the two wanderers consider the stars and starlight, wondering what's real.

Having split into factions, Vogel's mob versus Hacker's gang, they demand of Max: "Are you with us or against us?" Pleading for cooperation rather than confrontation, Max gets accused of being the maniac when the clairvoyant, Mr Spiro, sniffs him out. (Among the cops and vigilantes in the crowd are William H. Macy and Fred Gwynn.) Escaping, Max seeks shelter with Alma (Julie Kavner), who throws him back into the street for having left her standing alone at the altar while he copulated with her younger sister in the closet.

Just as Paul finds Irmy on the street and they begin to quarrel, they discover the body of the widow and rescue her baby along with $300.

Max enters the whorehouse where Jack, a student of facts and logic, asks him about his religious convictions, then pronounces him fearful of freedom and of making a leap of faith: "no point to anything" but the blood commands one to "live!" As a whore (Jodie Foster) leads Max to a room, he denies having ever paid for sex: "You just think you haven't." Chased by the relentless mob, Max encounters Simon Carr (Wallace Shawn), his rival, who announces that he has earned Mr Paulson's praise and the promotion while Max is despised.

Saving Irmy from the murderer, making himself the predator's object, Max runs into Armstead the Magician's tent, who employs his mirror for their escape; but from the clutches of magic, the murderer manages to disappear.

In the dark we sit in a fog of puzzlement: What is real, what is illusion, and what is going on here? Then we realize, where we are, as John Updike stated in Bech: A Book, "on the borderline of substance and illusion, of life and death." The magic of cinema: a movie about movie making.

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Copyright © 2008 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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