Questions and Answers

Question: Is Cassandra's Dream really one of the best 26 films of the last decade?
Answer: No.

In a New Yorker blog published towards the end of last year, Richard Brody posted a challenging, provocative and, to many readers, faintly obscure list of his personal favourite movies of the noughties. To this he added a supplementary list of the 16 also-rans including among other controversial titles (Sex Is Comedy! - my exclamation mark) Cassandra's Dream, the Woody Allen drama, a weird reworking of part of the plot of his masterpiece Crimes and Misdemeanours in which Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell are brutally miscast as a pair of East End brothers all but forced by circumstance to commit a cold blooded murder. It's a truly terrible film - it made the top ten films of the week of its release only because there were just seven films opening that week. Brody is, especially when discussing Godard, an intelligent, perceptive writer, but what was he thinking? Even if he didn't spot the bizarrely wayward accents of the two leads, he must have noticed that their performances, their line-readings were inept, the plot and dialogue equally risible. In fact the film provoked a lot of laughs among the (UK) national critics in the screening where I caught it (for review in the FT), but not from me. It was a miserable experience to witness so much talent go to waste, and to see yet more confirmation that the once great Allen was so very far past his best. It wouldn't make my list of the best 26 Woody Allen films - and I quickly compiled one to check - it didn't even make the next 10 in fact.

It is an interesting film but only incidentally in being a case study in the decline of one great film-maker, and the subject of great film-makers/stars/musicians/artists losing it is an endlessly intriguing one to which I will return, quite possibly often. An interest in this artistic phenomenon is not a celebration of failure but quite the opposite, it constitutes a study of how the happy relationship between a given artist and their muse/mojo is often a painfully brief, transient one and the occasionally poignant inadequacy of what follows in their careers shows through its striking contrast the greatness of their golden age only more strongly. It is of course also fun and contentious to try and pinpoint the precise film/performance/album/song/episode or whatever when the magic is gone. Brody's list achieves what it set out to do - to challenge and inspire and infuriate and bewilder - and more, because it proves, apparently, that there is no such thing as an objectively bad film/work of art which I had taken Cassandra's Dream to be an example of.

Thinking back to happier times:
Q: When did Allen Konigsberg and Diane Hall experience anhedonia?

No prizes, I'm afraid, but the answer will feature at the start of the next blog...