Of course we communicate. Now can we not talk about it anymore? I wanted to start with that because it is the only funny line in the film. If you don't believe me, click on the Memoralble Quotes option at the side of this page. Also, now you have heard the only funny line you do not need to see the film.
If you do see the film, you will find that it is a strange combination of Woody Allen's previous work. It contains two sets of lookalike actors in parallel story lines, just like Deconstructing Harry. It has a framing device of a philosophical discussion in a bar, just like Bullets over Broadway. The subject matter is the relentless marital infidelity, affairs, divorces and re-couplings that are familiar from Manhatten. The Wallace Shawm character sums up the film by saying "
comic or tragic, the most important thing is to enjoy life while you can because we only go round once and when its over, its over,,, and it could end like that" with a snap of his fingers. Well I suppose that is a reasonable summing up of Allen's view of life and, to be fair, many of us would agree with him in this post-God, age of the individual. The line about only going round once is a bit difficult to take though since Allen has clearly been round this particular block quite a few times.
The conceit of this film is that the same story can be told as either a tragedy or a comedy, paraphrasing Marx's remark that "history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce." We see Melinda, played by Radha Mitchell, as the only common character in two similar stories. I hesitate to call the stories tragic and comic because the truth is that they are rather similar, not very tragical and not very funny. I got confused with the lookalike characters until I realised that whenever Melinda had her hair in a mess we were watching the tragedy, when it was tidy we were watching the comedy. That's about the extent of the tragedy, she was having a bad hair day.
