The Eternal City gets a different kind of travelogue treatment here: a visit by a spectrum of Woody Allen representations. This is Rome seen through the prism of its creator. Allen's appearance was his first in six years, five films, his first since Scoop. As the dedication in the title suggests, it's a very personal dedication to the famous city.
The framing song is the familiar old hit parade topper, Volare. That defines the perspective as an American of Woody Allen’s age — who would remember that song from the Ed Sullivan Show. It was the rare foreign language song to become an American pop hit
Allen’s character serves a double function. As Jerry, tourist Hayley’s father, he deploys his familiar nebbish persona, nervous on the plane, suspicious of Hayley’s new fiancee, an Italian leftist. He’s also a failed music director. His long-suffering wife cares enough to define the reviewer’s “imbecile” as “ahead of your time.”
But like Allen, Jerry has a good eye for talent. With more bravery than most: his Pagliacci brilliantly performs entirely inside a working shower. As the conventional opera unfolds exuberantly around him, he performs in his shower box, washing and lathering as he sings, superbly. That lunatic staging choice is an actual necessity. His tenor can only sing well in the shower. This image resonates further: in an apparently conventional staging something personal operates in a private box within, weird but vital. Like the Allen element in any story he tells. It may seem odd but it’s necessary.
An alternative Allen surrogate opens the film. The Rome traffic director functions like a director: “My job, as you can see, is to see that the traffic move. I stand up here, and I see everything. All people. I see life. In this city, all is a story….There are many stories, next time you come.” On behalf of director Allen he introduces the characters and concludes the story.
Robert Benigni plays another Allen, a modest little man thrust into the ordeal of celebrity. TV makes him a sudden star — for being so ordinary. He enjoys promotion, public attention, the service of beautiful women, but he’s finally relieved when the spotlight moves on and he can return to his modest family. One might take this as an ironic reversal of the scandal/attention that drove Allen from the US to this cycle of European films.
A similar personal reflection may lie in the story of two newlywed provincials whose move to Rome is complicated by their separate adulteries. Those unconventional sexual experiences have the salutary effect of enabling them to see past the surface allure of Rome. They return to the simpler lives, especially enriched by their respective sexual experiences. Their illicit adventures deepened their relationship.
The other plot has two Allen surrogates. Alex Baldwin is the mature man who returns to the Rome of his student days and through Jessie Eisenberg relives a doomed old romance. The interplay of past and present is a familiar Allen device, especially apt in the Eternal City which unchanged has survived centuries of human waves. The woman the mature man warns the younger not to fall in love with is precisely the kind of enchanting, bright but disastrously neurotic beauty Allen was prone to fall for (as he recounts in his current memoir). As another signature, the “Ozymandias melancholia” is revived from Stardust Memories.
Perhaps lacking the moral intensity of Allen’s best films, this is still a delight, engaging, rich, amusing, and as this reading proposes — subtly personal.
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