Venice Film Festival 2007 diary part three

The pressure's mounting on Woody Allen. His last film, 'Scoop', failed to get UK distribution. His new film, 'Cassandra's Dream', previewed on the Lido at the Venice Film Festival, but Dave Calhoun struggles to see much improvement

Woody Allen’s ‘Cassandra’s Dream’, the director’s third consecutive film to be set and filmed in London after ‘Match Point’ and ‘Scoop’, had its world premiere in Venice on Sunday night and provoked further questions in the ongoing debate as to exactly what Allen is trying to achieve in the later years of his career. His goals remain high, but his ability to succeed in his aims seems ever more distant.

The film is a curious affair that sees Allen striving to offer a film of serious themes and intricate plotting. Like ‘Match Point’, it’s a story of risk, ambition and murder and one in which two brothers - played by Colin Farrell and Ewan McGregor - find themselves in a position where they decide to commit murder in order to preserve and pursue their selfish lifestyles. Yet unlike both ‘Match Point’ and ‘Scoop’, Allen has ditched his interest in the rarefied, even mythical world of the cultured British aristocracy and instead plumped for the milieu of London’s working classes. There are scenes of the film in which the family dynamics and the dingy wallpaper – if not the quality of ideas, performances or writing – offer echoes of the most stark of Mike Leigh’s films.

The title of the film is the name that the two brothers Ian and Terry give to the sailing boat that they buy at the film’s opening; their purchase is
our first sign of their ambition to escape the dreary reality of their lives in London. Smooth and confident, Ian (McGregor) works in his father’s greasy spoon café but fantasises about making it big in the hotel business like his rich uncle, Howard (Tom Wilkinson), who lives in California and is idolised by Ian and Terry’s mother (Clare Higgins), much to the annoyance of their salt-of-the-earth, downbeat father (John Benfield). Ian also has a new girl, an actress (Hayley Atwell), whose short attention span and ambitions he feels forced to satisfy at any cost in order to keep her. Terry (Farrell), meanwhile, is a nervy garage mechanic with a bad gambling habit that sees him lose nearly £90,000 one night playing poker, while his girlfriend Kate (Sally Hawkins) is keen for them to stop renting and buy a flat in the city.

The mood of ‘Cassandra’s Dream’ is distinctly gloomy and deeply pessimistic – much more so than any others of Allen’s more serious moral tales such as ‘Crimes and Misdemeanours’ or ‘Husband and Wives’. The crux of the film is that our two brothers are forced to rely on the financial help of their wealthy uncle (Wilkinson) when he comes to visit the family. But uncle’s help comes at a price: the pair must murder Martin Burns (Phil Davis), a wayward business associate of their uncle, in order to secure his support. It’s a deal with the devil that has awful consequences, most deeply for Terry, who is unable to deal with what he’s done and spirals towards a breakdown. Allen has always been good at social claustrophobia and burying his characters in the mire of their own behaviour; he succeeds here in creating an enveloping sense of a living nightmare.

There’s an unusual amount of social context for a Woody Allen film; the writer-director is keen for us to know each character’s background and ambitions so the better we can understand their later choices and actions. Cruel to say, perhaps, but Allen’s understanding of the struggles and desires of the British working classes isn’t entirely convincing - and why he should set himself that impossible task is anybody’s guess. It’s a striving for credible detail that’s evident too in Allen’s portrayal of London, and more successfully so. Gone are the recognisable locations that characterised ‘Match Point’ and made many a Londoner groan; the city of ‘Cassandra’s Dreams’ is much less easy to recognise and feels less like a theatre in which Allen has awkwardly staged a foreign story.

Increasingly, it feels that Allen is more committed as a writer than director – or at least his choice of stories creates that impression. Gone are the snappy directorial flourishes of staging that used to characterise his work such as the Greek chorus of ‘Mighty Aphrodite’ or the portrayal of the devil in ‘Deconstructing Harry’. Allen famously does little work with actors, and that approach is far too apparent here as his cast offer wildly inconsistent performances. Farrell, especially, with a bad London accent, looks like he’s crying out for help, his only way of expressing trauma by repeatedly scratching his head and staring at the floor. (Hawkins, meanwhile, has realised that if she’s going to give a good performance she’s going to have to do all the work herself and as such proves herself again to be one of our most promising younger actresses in an impressive supporting role.) It’s a critical flaw in a film that calls so much for believable psychological portraits that the acting is generally so ropey.

‘Cassandra’s Dream’ is mostly not successful, even if it is often compelling: its purpose is too confused, its execution too lazy, its handling of its performers too liberal. But, to Allen’s credit, he is still striving to create something fresh beyond the comedies for which he has become renowned and this time he has somehow crafted a wonky moral tragedy with hints of the British kitchen-sink drama. If anything, it’s a surprising move for Allen, who is now further than ever – geographically and thematically – from the Manhattan comedies that first made his name.

‘Cassandra’s Dream’ is no disaster; it's mostly diverting and occasionally amusing (although sometimes for all the wrong reasons). That said, it’s never more than just a passable work whose merits can only be judged positively only against more recent failures.