Then It was towards the end of my third year at undergraduate university in Leeds. I had a friend, a seven foot tall friend called Dave (sometimes Bambi) and he’d invited me out to meet some of his course mates. We sat on the roof of the DryDock pub on Woodhouse Lane which is a converted boat and looks like this:
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The plan had been to see Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkey which had been released that night. But we drank. A lot. So much in fact that we forgot the time, ran late, rushed down to the cinema and by the time we got there it had sold out. Which considering the state we were in probably wasn’t such a bad thing. I remember the moment clearly because Dave picked me up off the ground and carried me through the foyer in anger. He was very tall and very strong. I was embarrassed and told him so. We went to see Mighty Aphrodite instead. By then I was half asleep (one of the effects alcohol has on me) and don’t remember much else about the experience, other than that it was a packed house and we were stuffed in at the back.
Now I’ve not been able to find a trailer online, but the print advertising for Might Aphrodite is one of the most gratuitous examples of misrepresenting the product. You can see the standard poster above: there’s Mira Sorvino looking gorgeous standing next to a list of the actors superimposed on the intercom system for an apartment block. It suggests seduction, it suggests erotic thriller actually. Now, I really wish I’d been more intellectually conscious during the cinema viewing so that could report the audiences reaction, when straight after the credits, Woody cuts to a Greek amphitheatre and the ancient tragedy in full swing and is threaded throughout the story (“Um, this is Zeus. I'm not home right now, but you can leave a message and I'll get back to you. Please start speaking at the tone.”)
Over the past few months, I’ve been trying to quantify what it is about these films, beyond the credits, dialogue and mis-en-scene that mark them out as “Woody Allen” films, what makes them so unmistakable, that David Frankel or Rob Reiner & Nora Ephron couldn’t quite capture, and it’s this. It’s taking a fairly standard tv movie of the week story and throwing a “quirky” random element. Disillusioned sports writer seeks out the mother of his adopted child and it transpires she’s a prostitute so he tries to transform her life, is the stuff of a cable movie from the Eighties with Mark Harmon. Except would Hallmark have included a Greek chorus commenting on, then ultimately becoming part of the action? The moment when F Murray Abraham’s Leader hands Woody a pen so that he can write down Linda’s details is one of my favourite in all of these films.
That’s the clear difference with Charlie Kauffman’s films too. Kauffman takes an already surreal story idea then ads a twist. Woody’s stories tend to be fairly broad even repetitive tales of human failings which appear in Greek tragedies and comedies, but it’s the telling which changes. Admittedly, the chorus merges the storytelling elements of the voiceover and caption in Hannah or the faux-documentary interviews in Husbands and Wives with the metaphysical advice beings of Play It Again Sam and Alice. But Woody knows that by including these elements he’s increasingly the intellect of what could have been a baudy end of the pier show, with him as the dirty old man some assume him to be ogling Sorvino’s mammaries. There are even jokes which are only funny if you have a broad understanding of Greek theatre and psychoanalytical theory.
A pre-Burton Helena Bonham Carter is in the Mia role and Peter Weller sits in for Tony Roberts but in their brief scenes neither can do much in the face of Mira Sorvino’s multi-award winning performance. Once she appears half an hour in, all fall in her wake, including Woody who just sometimes seems in awe. With her monotone Mickey Mouse voice, perfectly controlled movements and poise, she should be a cartoon character, the dumb blonde parody. Yet she’s entirely sympathetic, the infinitely bouncy lilt to her voice and clothes her way of masking a life too dark for extrapolating in what’s really just a light comedy. Few of her roles since have exploited this unique quality and that’s why out of all the performers who appeared in Woody’s films in that period, she was the one deemed worthy of an award.
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