Woody Allen's
Match Point is about to open in the United States. Perhaps because Allen's movies are more popular in France than in the US, the film opened there several months ago and I had the opportunity to see it last November. I regard it as the most important film of his career (so far), the achievement of a superb artist at the top of his artistic power. I recommend it to my 2 million fellow Kossacks with no reservations whatsoever.
I am not usually a fan of Woody Allen, but I knew from the first instant that I was going to
love this movie. It struck me like a bolt of lightning because it opens with one of the most hauntingly beautiful arias in the history of music, "Una Furtiva Lacrima," from Donizetti's
L'Elisir d"Amore.
L'Elisir d"Amore tells the story of Nemorino, a simple minded peasant who falls in love with the rich and beautiful Adina, described in the libretto as "a capricious flirt." When Nemorino realizes that Adina has no interest in him, he is persuaded by a quack doctor to purchase a love potion -L'Elisir d'Amore -and to feed the potion to Adina.
Up to this point, the opera is a laugh a minute, jokes and clowning and fun. But when Nemorino gives the love potion to Adina, everything changes.
"A furtive tear springs from my eye," he sings rapturously as he watches her from afar. "I am filled with joy to see the way she looks at me." In the second verse, he says, "Our sighs mix together, our hearts palpitate together."
"M'ama, si m'ama!" he sings ecstatically in the third and last verse. "She loves me, yes, she loves me! " And he adds, "what more could anyone ask in life." And then the killer last line: "se puo morir, se puo morir" which means "one might die" --and the last word: "d'amore" --from love. (Note that the love potion drunk by Adina is nothing more that the concoction of a quack. This great passion takes place entirely in Nemorino's head.)
Allen uses the aria to frame and define his film, which, as we know from the first note, is about a peasant who falls in love with a beautiful girl. In the movie the peasant is named Chris Wilton, a somehow-not-quite-right Irish arriviste who gets himself hired as the tennis pro in a toney London club. In the club he is quickly taken up by Tom Hewitt, a vacuous and handsome English aristocrat who invites Chris to his palatial country house to meet the folks, and then to London to attend the opera. (Allen's chilly portrayal of the British rich, exposed here in their sumptuous settings like pieces of overripe fruit in a Caravaggio still life, is one of the deliciously wicked pleasures of the movie.) Chris a/k/a Nemorino instantly gets the hots for Tom's American girlfriend Nola a/k/a Adina; Chris and Nola have a thing; and I would ruin the movie for you if I talked any more about the plot, except to say that the opera they attend together is La Traviata, and the idea of treating Nola, a trampy nobody from Nowhere USA, as a modern version of Violetta, the poetic and doomed courtesan of Verdi's great tragic masterpiece, is a
coup de genie.
Opera informs and frames this movie from start to finish. Indeed the music is so brilliantly and seamlessly connected to movie that a person familiar with the music often knows precisely what is going to happen next on the screen --or is scandalized when Allen twists the movie
away from the operatic language. (Listen, for example, for the passionate words "palpite, palpite" -our hearts palpitate together -- being sung as Chris cruelly turns away from his wife's loving, yearning embrace.)
This is a movie about the triumph of evil; and the opera - an art form which is almost always about the triumph of evil (
Tosca to you!) - is used to enhance and illuminate the modern story. Indeed I suspect that Allen selected old and scratchy versions of some of his opera selections for the specific purpose of telling modern audiences that the old fashioned art form known as opera is an unbeatable way to tell a story about basic human passions like love and death.
Allen's has dealt with the triumph of evil elsewhere, most notably in
Crimes and Misdemeanors. But nowhere else has he expressed himself so intensely, so passionately - and with such explicitly political comment.
The politics appears towards the end of the film, in a scene in which Allen implicitly turns his protagonist into George Bush -or at least into an intelligent, literate version of George Bush. For two or three chilling minutes, Allen's protagonist talks about the war in Iraq without ever mentioning it -and the audience suddenly understands the movie in an entirely different light. (The scene reminded me of Norman Mailer's
Why We Are in Vietnam, a short novel about a group of Texans on a hunt in Alaska. Vietnam is never once mentioned in the novel, as the word Iraq is never mentioned in the film: in both works, the message is delivered as art and not as propaganda; in both cases the silence is used (in the movie, in my view, particularly successfully) to amplify the decibels of the message.)
No intelligent moviegoer should miss
Match Point, whether or not you share Allen's politics - or approve of his private life. (Indeed you may want to go again and again, because the film is so crammed with ideas, images and possibilities that a second viewing is almost mandatory.) It is a masterpiece that uses a complex mixture of opera, drama and cinematography to address profound questions of good and evil; it is an artist's protest against a senseless war; perhaps most of all, it is a superb entertainment with masterful acting, irresistible sets and thrilling, innovative cinematography.
Woody Allen is seventy years old --and counting. I am now a dedicated fan and cannot
wait for his next movie.