NEW YORK STORIES
Written by Richard Prince
With Heather McComb, Talia Shire, Giancarlo Giannini, Don Novello, and Selim Tlili.
The usual argument made against sketch movies is that they’re invariably uneven–which is true enough but also rather beside the point. (If the same argument were made in publishing, we’d never have any collections of short stories.) Sketch movies by a single director, like Julien Duvivier’s Tales of Manhattan (1942), John Ford’s The Rising of the Moon (1957), Roger Corman’s Tales of Terror (1962), and Woody Allen’s own Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (but Were Afraid to Ask) (1972), theoretically minimize the lack of balance, although these usually turn out to be uneven as well. (It will be interesting to see whether Jim Jarmusch’s Memphis-based sketch film, which is currently in the works, will be able to avoid this problem.)
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When a sketch movie involves different directors, which happens more often, the issue of overall unity becomes more prominent. Sometimes the unity is supplied by a single author, such as Somerset Maugham in Quartet (1949) and Trio (1950) and Edgar Allan Poe in Spirits of the Dead (1968); sometimes it comes from a category like the seven deadly sins, which has already furnished three separate sketch features (one Italian and linked to the neorealists, one French and linked to the New Wave, and the last a more recent international effort directed exclusively by women). But perhaps the most interesting sketch features by different directors are those that are unified by subtle and secret factors as well as more blatant ones. My favorite example of this subgenre, The Story of Three Loves–directed by Gottfried Reinhardt and Vincente Minnelli for MGM in 1953–is linked together not only by the common ground implied by the title, but less obviously by the impact of European existentialism on Hollywood in the early 50s.
The issue of encroaching middle age may be just as important to Francis Coppola’s “Life Without Zoe,” but in this case the anecdote skirts the issue and deals with it only obliquely, because the narrator and central character is a 12-year-old girl named Zoe (Heather McComb). The precocious daughter of a wealthy, semiestranged couple who usually aren’t around (Talia Shire and Giancarlo Giannini), she lives at the Sherry-Netherland Hotel and is taken care of mainly by the family butler (Don Novello). The elaborately contrived plot–which involves the nephew of an Arab king (Selim Tlili), a missing diamond earring, her father’s career as a successful flute player, and the eventual reconciliation of her parents–is ultimately less important than the style and mood of the sketch, which, as production designer Dean Tavoularis has pointed out, suggest “a kind of Noel Coward-like world for children” that has more to do with the 40s than it does with the present.
Allen’s reversion to the style and tone of his earlier comedies isn’t quite complete, any more than Scorsese’s return to his sources in “Life Lessons” negates the lessons learned from his more recent work. The use of nostalgic pop tunes here is every bit as central as it is in September and Another Woman, and the final tune used, which I won’t divulge, actually illustrates the end of his fable with a literalism that goes well beyond any of his previous uses of musical cues. Similarly, Allen milks a final, extended close-up of himself well beyond the duration that he would have permitted in any of his critical self-portraits prior to Manhattan, although he arguably comes closer to justifying that conceit in this context than he has in all his intervening work. At least some of the other details–such as Farrow’s children by another marriage and Sheldon’s penthouse apartment–seem every bit as self-referential as anything in the Coppola sketch.
