To Rome With Love, or: Woody Allen's metafilm and his take on the bedroom farce

To Rome With Love (2012)

Directed by Woody Allen

***SPOILERS***

People will endlessly compare Woody Allen’s To Rome With Love to his 2011 film Midnight in Paris—which is justifiable for many reasons—but the famed director’s retake on the age-old bedroom farce is nothing new. To Rome With Love can be seen as a cross between New York Stories and A Midsummer Night’s Sex Dream, which itself owes its merits to Ingmar Bergman’s strangely uplifting bedroom farce Smile of a Summer Night. Hell, you could throw Allen’s first film What’s New Pussycat? into the mix. With shifting bedrooms and partners comes shifts in scenery, and in a way Allen has created a bedroom farce unlike any other. He’s essentially sidestepped the conventional aspects of the subgenre and sprinkled it in bits throughout Rome—a country that doesn’t exactly condone cheating. It just wouldn’t be Woody Allen if it wasn’t a bit tongue-in-cheek—just remember how breezily Allen penned his famous artists of Midnight in Paris, making Salvador Dalí a bumbling fool who constantly saw, yes, “a rhinoceros”. There’s nothing bitter about Allen’s inoffensive jabs at intellectuals and Rome’s stereotypical collective stinginess, but what most people don’t recognize through the light wafts of comedy lazily floating throughout To Rome With Love is a director who, as far as I can tell, recognizes when he’s made a shitty film, and also recognizes when his career can be less than satisfying.

Take this quote from Allen in an interview with Slant Magazine:

"I start off with very great ambitions. I want to make Citizen Kane. And I shoot the film, and then when I get into the editing room, I realize that I screwed up, irredeemably. I edit the film in any configuration that will avoid embarrassment. I put the beginning at the end, take the middle out, change things. The editing process becomes the floundering of a drowning man. I go in there, and I have various themes, and I'm gonna edit this thing like it's Potemkin or something, but it doesn't work out that way. I'm just in there selling out left and right, just losing every ounce of integrity I have and trying to survive."

Irredeemable seems the perfect word for moviegoers’ collective opinion on To Rome With Love, which can be heartfelt, brazenly witty, and frustrating as hell all at once. Disconnected by any true motif outside of adultery and unable to capture the spirit of Rome or its hilarious conceitedness, Allen’s only seeming admirable virtue is his attention to the moment, creating beautiful awkwardness that causes a resounding face-palm throughout the theater. Allen has complete command over the silliness within each story, but no true method of connecting them in any conventional or dexterous manner. But what Allen accomplished is, dare I say it, quite admirable. If the above quote means anything, then To Rome With Love is very much a metafilm for Woody Allen. And once again defying the conventional structure as he did with the bedroom farce, Allen’s metafilm is a hilarious and strikingly pathetic point of view from the director’s chair.

The film starts with a narrator circling through the various inhabitants of Allen’s story, lightly brushing up their backstories and loosely connecting their presences in Rome. And after all the narration and introductions, who is the last to be introduced? Woody Allen. Introduced as Hayley’s (Alison Pill) father Jerry, Allen jumps into his own metafilm for what will play out to be a strange puppeteering of events that isn’t as glaringly obvious as Charlie Kaufman’s appearance in Adaptation, but instead entirely muted through the juxtaposed storylines. As adultery occurs in each storyline, the only untouched tale remains with Jerry. His role in To Rome With Love bears a conspicuous resemblance to his aforementioned quote—a man at the tail end of his career, fighting and struggling to make something from nothing, and failing miserably. It's sort of like Raúl Ruiz's muted presence in Mysteries of Lisbon, but sprinkled with Allen's strange brand of humor and mildly less soul-crushing.

The most obvious hole in such a theory is, of course: we have to believe Allen purposely created a flawed film. Despite his recent lackluster efforts (Scoop, Vicky Christina Barcelona) and a plethora of mediocrity throughout his career, Allen remains one of the more intelligent and aware filmmakers. Always bearing a point, it’s hard to believe this particular film’s main motif is to capture the beauty of Rome and its swirling overflow of individual stories. Because if it is, there’s nothing redeemable about To Rome With Love. But for Allen’s metafilm to be truly meta, the disconnectedness seems to make sense. Allen refers to his editing process as the “floundering of a drowning man”, and that he’s “selling out right and left, just losing every ounce of integrity I have.” Not only does that quote speak directly of his character in To Rome With Love, but of the filmmaking process itself, in cutting down and interchanging scenes, ignoring all sentiments of clear-cut thematic connectivity and stringing together a few languid tales of love that bear a deeper connection than meets the eye.

So once the concept is in place, it becomes a matter of providing nourishment to each individual story. There are arguments to be made in that regard, as Leopoldo’s (Roberto Benigni) tale drags its ass into the closing moments, becoming far too predictable far too early, or as John’s (Alec Baldwin) out-of-body moment hammers the same point into the ground over and over. But above all, without a clear-cut, traditionally apparent thematic connection between the bunch, these stories bear a false collective persona that appears to fail as a whole. However unsophisticated it may be, Allen manages to tie his tales together not through the beauty of love (as seen in Paris je t’aime), but through Allen’s own warped ego.

There’s a legitimate complaint surrounding the degradation of Allen’s female leads, as they’ve sputtered into dull, whiny messes in recent years (Match Point), far from the days of Diane Keaton and Mia Farrow. But with To Rome With Love, which features several female players that  resemble nothing but archetypes, it seems fitting to have them berating and controlling their men. In fact, each and every tale features grounded lower-class character dishing out life lessons to their narrow-minded companions, essentially placing Allen in each of these stories. In each story lies the allure of temptation (through sex) and its bittersweet results. Antonio (Alessandro Tiberi), a feeble, cowardly virgin, gives in to Anna’s (Penélope Cruz) advancements, signaling gumption to explore new unconventional methods that “may surprise you”, while Milly (Alessandra Mastronardi)—Antonio’s opposite—is playfully seduced by an intriguing thief, excited to explore before returning back to the norm. Leopoldo rejects fame and becomes ecstatic of its loosened tentacles, only to come back and beg for more once the spotlight has left for someone else. And in what is the most glaringly obvious reincarnation of Allen, John’s self-revealing moment in which he assesses his own personal and career choices. But with John there’s no redemption or interference, but instead a gloomy acceptance as he awaits the inevitable, witnessing his own irreversible choices squander another precious moment of life.

Each of these stories can be paired alongside Jerry’s tale, which features Allen himself forcing his hand with an individual (he purports to be) more talented than he. As Jerry receives an appropriately awkward introduction, he is eventually greeted with temptation upon hearing Giancarlo’s (Fabio Armiliato) voice, which is promptly met with a bit of temptation through Allen’s sprawling bedroom farce, as each character is tempted: Antonio is tempted by Anna, whom he later describes as the opposite of his wife; Milly is tempted by celebrities, whose exciting presences contradict her dull husband; Jack (Jesse Eisenberg) is tempted by Monica (Ellen Page), who’s sexual attraction cannot be explained, but nonetheless explored; and Leopoldo’s slowly begins to accept his newfound celebrity status, going into more detail about his morning routines and reflections on life. As Giancarlo slowly gives into Jerry’s come-ons, we see the surrounding characters finally giving into temptations. Giancarlo attends an audition as each character inches closer to giving in, and the grand opera act is paired alongside each character finally giving into temptation.

The results are as varying as their metaphorical connections to Allen’s career would be. Despite drifting apart, Milly and Antonio come together with a new combined persona, with each of them benefitting from their departures. Leopoldo, of course, becomes a pathetic little man in search of fame when he hasn’t earned it, shouting what he had for breakfast and pulling his pants down in the middle of the street. And John seems accepting of the fact that he sold out, as looking upon his early years proved to be a draining affair. And keeping in line with all these stories’ final acts, Jerry blindly boasts his newest “accomplishment”, unknowing of the fact that his supporting players actually carried the weight in his misguided venture. His wife (Judy Davis), who berated his stubbornness regarding Giancarlos’ opera career, duly noted: “You equate retirement with death.” In what is pretty much the most meta moment of the film, we see a man who isn’t guided by creating another Annie Hall or Manhattan, but a workaholic who’s seen it all and made it all, can't stop making movies for the life of him, and owns the self-awareness to step back and recognize past mistakes—a true sign of a great filmmaker that won't stop until the day he dies.