Even such a lightweight airy number by Woody Allen achieves a heft ordinary auteurs would strain to achieve.
In this delightful comedy Allen exercises his love for 1940s crowd pleasers. The film mixes screwball comedy and gumshoe thriller. The script hits a Billy Wilder pace. The music, settings and stock characters recall Howard Hawks at his best.
Allen’s performance as the insurance investigator is arguably his clearest homage to Bob Hope. “She graduated from Vassar and I went to driving school. “ A woman has a body that won’t quit: “Quit? It won't take five minutes off for a coffee break.” Does he want to see the siren’s strawberry birthmark on her thigh? “Sure, when can I take the full tour?” And of course: “I may be a scummy vermin but I'm an honest scummy vermin.”
Lengthening the tradition — the Allen and Helen Hunt characters are a modern Beatrice and Benedick as they wallow in an articulate antagonism that could only belie their essential love. In the fireworks kissing scene Allen exuberantly explodes the perennial cliche.
The film may lack the obvious philosophic underpinning of Allen’s later work but it’s cut from the same cloth.
As in The Purple Rose of Cairo, Alice, his New York Stories episode and the later Magic in the Moonlight, etc., Allen uses variations on magic to shift his characters into another mode of experience. Here hypnosis is ambivalent in its purposes. In the stage act it moves CW and Sally Ann into their antithetical relationship, love supplanting their antagonism. But as every opening brings vulnerability, the two also serve the jewel thief hypnotist’s criminal purposes.
Hypnotism here serves as magic and art work for Allen elsewhere. It provides an escape from the “scummy…grungy” existence Allen always envisions the human condition to be, hungry for any possible escape or respite. The curse turns out to be a blessing.
Indeed this idea may animate all of Allen’s compulsive returns to the music and film genres of the past. We’re cursed with mortality. What healthier insouciance than to ensure the immortality of the genres by which we used to connect?
4 comments:
Many thanks for your perceptive and incisive book on Shtisel which added hugely to my enjoyment and appreciation of the series. I was particularly grateful for clarification on the episode about the estranged son which I didn't completely understand from the film
A couple of suggestions.
1. I was wondering why Shulem's brother is in Antwerp: are diamonds relevant?
2. It seems significant that Shulem frequently gets names wrong (eg Kaufmann/Koifman) - indicating at least that he doesn't listen to/care about others
3. Though Kaufman makes out to be concerned with aesthetics and speaks of the artist's studio as 'holy' - he can be 'bought' - he sold Akiva's painting of his mother to his father when the price was right...
Tim Dowley
While this might be a random place to leave a comment on your Shtisel book “Reading Shtisel”, I too am grateful and want for subjecting this series to the insightful criticism of a professor steeped in film and drama studies. After each episode, I read your recap and find myself gaining so much additional insights into the themes and characters’ motivations. I would have missed so much without your analysis, and for that I thank you.
I too hope that the 3rd season is shot soon after the pandemic (Israel seems to be doing better in this regard than the US. As a senior myself I expect this to be a long three year slog to a vaccine). Looking forward to a quick production and English subtitles so Netflix can stream it to US customers.
Considering your book’s closing Conclusion that a 3rd season should continue with the same producers, writers and actors, I’m a tad concerned about Netflix’s reputed contract with Marta Kaufmann, the producer of the popular 1990s sitcom “Friends”, to produce an American version of Shtisel set in LA (???!, why not Brooklyn or Rockland County??) I fear this adaptation would make these complex characters and culture into a melodramatic one dimensional cartoon like the recently popular show “Unorthodox” which the New Yorker described in terms of the popular trope of religious Jews “escaping” from a oppressive community and finding secular “freedom”.
Lastly, I wish you and your wife a long life in beautiful Vancouver, at least in part from my selfish hope that I will be able to read an expanded 3rd edition of “Reading Shtisel” as we explore the 3rd season of the Israeli Shtisel drama.
...and want to thank you for...
To unknown:
1. Yes, I’d assume diamonds are involved, especially since in II, 9 after Malta’s death, Nuchem instructs Libbi to hide any diamonds she finds during her inventory of Malka’s room (this is later framed as a joke, but given Nuchem’s selfishness, it probably was not). Akiva’s inventory, unlike that of his uncle and cousin, focuses on sentimental chatchkas and religious items of no intrinsic worth to remember his grandmother by. Also, inheriting Malka’s apartment seems to provide him with enough money to close his business in Belgium and move back to start a new one in Jerusalem.
2. Absolutely. I believe that Prof. Yancowar also mentions Shulem’s narcissistic tendencies in often forgetting names and not caring about others but using them to get his stomach or ego fed (particularly his secretary whom he fires and then forgets he did so when calling her about taking bereavement leave when she no longer works at the Yeshiva).
3. Need to watch last three episodes for this point, but if Kaufman is a bad guy it’s just because of his difficulty accepting and working with an odd duck like Akiva who wants to stray into the secular world with creating art while being otherwise observant, I don’t put him in the same league as a crook like Fuchs or the “elderly whisperer” videographer.
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