The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985)
Directed by Woody Allen

Film Review

Today it is hard to appreciate just how important the movies were to the generation living through the Great Depression of the 1930s.  In a decade of almost unimaginable hardship, movies offered the only form of escape for millions from a life that was relentlessly grim.  It was into this world that Woody Allen was born and, although he was too young to fully experience the palliative power of cinema in the 1930s, the movies had such an impact on him in his formative years that he was able to convey this, with such a welter of feeling, in one of his most perfect films, The Purple Rose of Cairo - which just happens to be one of the few films of his that he rates highly.  It is also one of the minority of his films in which the director does not appear on screen, not that this diminishes its charm in any way.

'Illusions are what make life bearable' is the theme that runs through much of Allen's work, and this alone would explain the enduring popularity of movies.  What cinema gives us isn't just a brief distraction from the traumas and travails of our everyday existence, but a genuine escape into another world.  Watching a movie is like stepping through the wardrobe into Narnia.  We enter a whole new reality, a safer, simpler, more comprehensible, less scary reality than the one we struggle to make our lives in.  We are not just passive on-lookers.  We become the characters on the screen, we inhabit their lives, we experience their feelings, we even share in their happy endings.  As you watch a movie, you feel as if you are coming alive, and when it's over and the final 'end' caption sends us back home to reality, we come away with the warm glow of transcendence.  We do not dread the horrors and upsets that life is about to sling in our direction, for we know that we can return to movieland any time we choose.  The magical wardrobe is always there, its door temptingly ajar in our mind's eye.

The Purple Rose of Cairo reminds us how much we need cinema to help us to cope with life in the real world, but it comes with it a cogent moral - namely that we should not get too close to the illusion.  Our world and the world of movie fiction are separate universes, and madness and sorrow will surely follow if ever we try to conflate the two. Played by Mia Farrow, the heroine in Allen's film is Cecilia, such a sad specimen of humanity that at first we find it hard to sympathise with her.  She can't pick up a plate without dropping it, she allows her brute of her husband to throw her around her grubby one-room apartment like a deflated basketball, her every utterance is a mumbled apology, and her only pleasure is to gape like a lovelorn teenager at the movie screen, projecting her own personal fantasies on whichever square-jawed actor takes her fancy.

Cecilia is what we must never become - a celluloid junkie.  She is so hooked on the movie drug that you can't imagine her finding happiness - or even wanting to find anything approaching happiness - in the real world.  Cinema is her whole life and her infatuation with the movies is so strong that she actually ends up willing a character on the screen to break through the fourth wall and join her in her world.  (Woody Allen is not the first filmmaker to employ the fantastic conceit of people stepping in and out of projected movies - Buster Keaton did it as early as 1924 in his film Sherlock Jr. and it has been copied several times since.)  As Cecilia embarks on a love affair with her pith-helmeted beau idéal Tom Baxter she soon comes to appreciate the drawbacks of dating a scripted character.  Tom's knowledge of life is limited to what his screenwriters have allowed him to say and do.  He knows how to drive a car, but not how to start one.  He has no concept of what physical love is (since his movie was made in the era of Hays Code censorship, and the words 'brothel' and 'prostitute' mean nothing to him.  He is the man no woman can resist, but he is merely the idealised sketch of a man.  Romantic possibilities are indeed limited when the guy you are in love with expects a fade to black every time a clinch is in the offing.

So, when the actor playing Tom turns up and turns on the charm, Cecilia is easily lured away from her celluloid lover as other illusions come crowding into her ditsy little head.  He may have more in the way of a functioning sex drive than his screen alter ego, but Gil is even more deluded than Cecilia, convinced that he is the star of his last picture and destined to be the next Ronald Colman.  To us it is obvious he is just a second rate actor with a ginormous ego (the film's one minor flaw is that Jeff Daniels is far more convicing as the fictional Tom than the real world Gil), but to Cecilia, her head full of schoolgirl fantasies, he is the Prince Charming she has been waiting for all these years.  Cecilia trades one wild illusion for another and ends up with both vanishing in a puff of theatrical smoke.  Too late does it dawn on her that film stars are as two-dimensional and illusory as the characters they portray on the screen, and so she soon finds herself as alone and bereft as ever in her pathetic little world of smashed plates and smashed dreams.  But, come what may, she still has the movies.  Life may be terrible, but she can still escape whenever she wants.  It is with a wistful smile, not a tear, that we watch Cecilia project herself into Fred Astaire's arms at the end of the film, well and truly transported to Heaven.

Film Synopsis

New Jersey, at the height of the Great Depression.  Cecilia's life is one of unending misery.  Abused by her thug of a husband, barely scraping by on what she earns as a waitress, her only refuge is the movies.  At the local cinema, she is so enchanted by the romantic comedy The Purple Rose of Cairo that she watches it over and over, until she is head over heels in love with one of the minor characters, an archaeologist named Tom Baxter.  One evening, Cecilia is almost knocked out of her seat when Tom suddenly turns to camera and addresses her, before walking out of the film to engage her in conversation.  The audience are as disconcerted by this improbable turn of events as the characters still in the movie, which is stalled whilst one of its dramatis personae plays hooky.  As Tom and Cecilia embark on a love affair which is mildly handicapped by Tom's lack of knowledge of the real world, the film's producer and the actor who played Tom, Gil Shepherd, fly in from Hollywood to try and resolve matters.  Aware of what an untold number of Tom Baxters breaking out of the film and marauding the country could do to his career, Gil goes after Tom and Cecilia.  Having failed to persuade the character he created to return from when he came, Gil convinces Cecilia that he is in love with her and offers her a new life with him in Hollywood.  It looks as if Cecilia's story will have a happy ending after all - but surely such things only exist in the movies...?