Daily Blague

Woody Allen has made several fine pictures that aren't at all funny. Interiors, Stardust Memories, and Another Woman are beautiful, romantic films with few laughs or none. Significantly, Mr Allen does not appear in two of them, and that is also the case in his latest film, Match Point. Unlike the other movies that I've singled out, however, Match Point is thoroughly gripping. Mr Allen has never made a film quite like it.

In Match Point, Woody Allen takes the story line from Crimes and Misdemeanors that featured Martin Landau and Anjelica Huston and moves it to London. The central characters have become a generation younger; they're starting out in life. And whereas the romance in Crimes and Misdemeanors is presented in a handful of flashbacks, Match Point follows the illicit relationship from its beginning to its end. Finally, the all-but-omnipotent Judah Rosenthal has been transformed into the foundling Chris Wilton, a young man of few personal resources. All of these changes make Match Point more conventional that Woody Allen's tend to be, but they also make it more sympathetic.

Something else is new: Woody Allen has never made a film that isolated its hero from his surroundings - if only morally - as Match Point cuts off Chris Wilton. Given his handiness with a shotgun, we may prefer to think of Chris as an anti-hero, but, as in Crimes and Misdemeanors, we are on this guy's side whether we want to be or not. We watch him twist and writhe, we sense the despair that attends his ruthlessness, and the cynicism that takes its place. We're helplessly complicit in his wrongdoing, and we're as desperate to save his hide as he is. That's because Match Point is about the very pretty face of Jonathan Rhys Meyers, an Irishman in his late twenties who, not surprisingly, has played Elvis Presley in a miniseries. His face sells us Chris Wilton's crises without giving us time to consider the offer. It also assures us of something that I hope is not true of its owner, which is that Chris Wilton is weak.

The trailer for Match Point was so high-strung and suspenseful that I wondered if the actual film would be "a Woody Allen movie," and here I've enumerated so many deviations from standard that you may be wondering the same thing. I haven't yet made up my mind; I'll have to see it again a few times. Match Point is, visually, very beautiful; following the characters around the nicer parts of London, the camera likes what it sees. Beyond that, however, I can't yet tell whether Mr Allen's budget of tics has been wiped from the final product, or whether it has been transformed into an invisible iron grasp of filmmaking. Match Point may not be a tribute to Alfred Hitchcock, but it's as sure and serious as anything made by The Master.