Film Review
Given his profound love of European cinema, it was inevitable that Woody
Allen would one day get round to paying an affectionate tribute to one of
the most stylish and enduring of film aesthetics, namely German expressionism
of the 1920s and early 1930s. It's a shame that this only happened
towards the end of Allen's 'golden run' before his creativity and inventive
flair began to desert him amid personal crises in the early 1990s.
Had it been made half a decade earlier,
Shadows and Fog could have
been a comedy tour de force to rival Mel Brooks' similarly tongue-in-cheek
horror pastiche
Young Frankenstein
(1974). As it was, Woody Allen's
billet doux to the precursor
of film noir is a somewhat understated affair, offering surprisingly little
of tangible merit beneath its striking visuals. It's a film that lives
up to its name - there is so little to grab hold of and it just slips from
your grasp like fragments of dream, never really coalescing into anything
of real substance. Yet, for all that, it is a film with an unmistakable
allure.
When
Shadows and Fog was first released in 1992 it was almost universally
given the thumbs down by the critics (even those who had previously been
favourable to Allen's work). It bombed at the box office and remains
one of the director's least commercially successful films - and yet it is
a long, long way from being his worst cinematic offering. To dismiss
Shadows and Fog as purely a self-indulgent exercise in style is unfair.
It may not be Woody Allen's most profound, most inspired or funniest film,
but it remains a seductively stylish piece of film art, a homage to the work
of such legendary directors as Fritz Lang and F.W. Murnau that positively
glows with reverence and mischief. The menacing, silhouetted ghoul
that brings terror to a mist-shrouded city dreamscape is an obvious amalgam
of the fiends that stalk Lang's
M (1931),
Robert Wiene's
The
Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920) and Murnau's
Nosferatu (1922),
but the bleakly suffocating mood of the piece is most strongly redolent of
of G.W. Pabst's
The
Three Penny Opera (1931), and the fact that the film liberally borrows
Kurt Weill's music from the original opera
Die Dreigroschenoper adds
greatly to this impression.
Here, Allen's familiar schlemiel persona becomes a passive Josef K. figure
straight out of a Franz Kafka story - an innocent forever adrift in a vaguely
constructed world that he fails to connect with and which becomes his relentless
tormentor. Fearful of his landlady, his fiancée and his boss
(three familiar Kafka fetishes), Allen wanders through the foggy urban wilderness
like a lost soul, and ends up being threatened not only by an anonymous maniac
killer but fascistic police officers and rival vigilante factions pursuing
their own plans whose aims are as deadly as they are nebulous. It's
an opportunity for Allen to rehearse his favourite themes of whether life
has any meaning, whether God exists, and whether life is worth living.
On this occasions there are few nougats of profundity - Allen is just replaying
well-worn ideas like someone lazily dipping into an old record collection.
There's little in the way of a plot and the story is basically just a scruffy
collection of cliché's lifted from horror films of the '20s and '30s.
Hardly any effort seems to have gone into the script at all. When the
film ends, with shocking abruptness, you have a sense that you have hardly
sat through a film at all - rather that you have merely dozed off and experienced
the strangest of dreams.
The plethora of big name actors who are wheeled in and out of the film with
indecent haste did little to endear the film to the critics. Madonna
was the kiss of death to many a film of this era, but mercifully she is on
screen for barely a few seconds and is surprisingly good in her temptress
cameo role. Donald Pleasence is less well-used - he owes his presence
in the film no doubt to his long association with the horror genre, but he
is dispatched even before he has made any impression. John Malkovich
is just plainly miscast and John Cusack looks awkwardly anachronistic.
Of Allen's supporting artists, only Mia Farrow appears comfortable in this
film, once again playing one of those sad, put-upon wretches that she inhabits
so easily (it's virtually a carbon copy of the bruised heroine she played
in Allen's
The Purple
Rose of Cairo (1985)).
With the film disgracing itself somewhat in both the acting and script departments,
you wonder what there is left to redeem
Shadows and Fog and make it
worth watching. The film does have one spectacular ace up its sleeve,
which is its exceptional production design, for which Santo Loquasto should
take the lion's share of the credit (he'd perform a similar miracle on Allen's
later
Bullets Over Broadway).
Loquasto oversaw the construction of what was, at the time, the largest studio
set ever made for a movie in New York. With its claustrophobic alleyways,
huddled ogre-like buildings, bridges and archways, all constantly wreathed
in a thick and sinister fog, the sprawling city set becomes the most enigmatic
and powerful character in the film, and Carlo Di Palma's stunning black and
white photography gives it a solidity and depth of expression that no other
character in the film can match.
It is the ultimate in movie expressionism - where the sets, the design and
the cinematography take it upon themselves to convey all of the feeling,
whilst the actors are left resembling faceless puppets, soulless shells in
human form that are incapable of showing any real emotion. There is
one stark exception to this - the beautiful little scene when there is a
break in the mist and Mia Farrow's pitiful character is able to glimpse a
starry patch of sky above her. Because light has taken such a long
time to reach her (naturally circus sword-swallowers have a good basic understanding
of physics), she knows that the stars she sees have long ceased to exist,
and this prompts her and her deranged companion (Woody) to wonder if life
isn't
all an illusion. And maybe that's all that life is: a
dream of shadows and fog that go on swirling forever in a sea of nothing.
It's all a trick of the imagination.
© James Travers 2016
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.
Next Woody Allen film:
Husbands and Wives (1992)
Film Synopsis
In the 1920s, a town swathed in fog is terrorised by a mysterious serial
killer who roams the streets, strangling men and women unlucky enough to
cross his path. One night, a cowardly bookkeeper, Kleinman, is coerced
into joining a vigilante committee to hunt down and arrest the killer.
Unaware of the danger that lurks in her midst, a young woman named Irmy arrives
in the town, having turned her back on her life as a circus performer and
her unfaithful husband, Paul. She finds a temporary refuge in a brothel,
where she reluctantly takes 700 dollars from a student in return for satisfying
his carnal needs. Not long afterwards, Irmy is picked up by the police
for soliciting without a licence and runs into Kleinman, a fellow lost soul
looking for meaning in life. At Irmy's insistence, Kleinman gives the
money she earned as a prostitute to the church, and is thereupon menaced
on four fronts - by the killer, the police, rival gangs of vigilantes and
his unforgiving employer. He then gets to meet his hero, the legendary
magician Armstead, and together they find a way to bring to an end the strangler's
reign of terror.
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.