match point (film)

'he's a very thoughtful young man! why we just had a conversation about dostoevsky!'

confucius said:

just seen this.

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funnily enough, so have I (with dissensus' resident Feuerbachian). And I can unreservedly describe it as one of the worst films I have ever seen. viz-

a plot somewhat akin to the result of a primary school creative writing class when one is asked to write a thriller. and the dream of the constable! (a part played, incidentally, in a manner more befitting an episode of Heartbeat than a film by a still fairly respected director)

APPALLING DIALOGUE- 'you know that's her achilles heel emotionally!' 'has anyone seen my strindberg book?' (HE READS PENGUIN CLASSICS HE IS DEEP DO YOU SEE) 'it's only la bloody traviata!' 'i have an epic collection!' etc etc ad nauseam. the only consolation being that myself and the unfortunate person i saw it with get to quote these lines and then laugh uproariously

a preposterous idea of London that even the hoitiest Portobello Tory would consider a little unlikely- everyone constantly going to 'the tate modern' to see 'some great new painter', or 'the saatchi', or having apartments by parliament- and of course, all office jobs are in the gherkin

truly awful performances- rhys myers' utter woodenness at least has the excuse of playing a sociopath (crikey woody allen's read the talented mr ripley and isn't shy about letting us know), but the rest- well, i can think of little in recent cinema as toe-curling as scarlett johansson's 'emotional outbursts'

and perhaps worst of all, it induces the worry that, if i were a new yorker, i might find all woody allen films (lots of which, eg stardust memories, or zelig, or love & death, or bananas, i absolutely love) as emetic as this. so i'm trying to at least console myself with the thought that it's probably just incipient senility.....

It's a taken a few days for me to truly realise the miserable awfulness of this film...to kick off, any comparison to Ripley/Highsmith a million miles wide of the mark - her amoral, ambivalent creation runs rings round Allen's supposedly profound schemer (blank, staring eyes do not a psychopath make, and making your character read Dostoyevsky and Strindberg in the country retreats of upper-class ponces is a really poor way of indicating hidden depths and dark criminal proclivities).

If Allen thinks he's pinned down the London upper-classes, with their tennis, opera and clunky directness ('I want three babies, while I'm young!'), he's utterly mistaken. The repeated 'luck' metaphor (it's like a tennis ball hitting the net and coming down one side or the other! you can never be sure! the 'Irish' lad could have been a pro had tennis-luck gone in his favour! But now he must kill...to make his own luck! Do you see?!).

Johansson putting on an American accent is one of the most painful things ever...and the obvious glee Allen takes in filming her damp (running in the rain with no bra! soaked in baby oil!) is, well, quite foul. Plus her 'bad neighborhood' looks suspiciously like Mayfair, not particularly well-known for its high shotgun-muder-rate, nor, er, for being remotely affordably, even by the best-paid boutique-workers. And her 'sacrifice' (she's poor, sexy and friendly....poshness and assumed poshness must get her out of the way before she upsets the apple-cart of snobbery), portrayed in a modern-day tragic style ('it's like Macbeth! They come back to haunt you!') is just ow, ow, ow....

Anyway, must be off, going to the Tate Modern to see an exhibition by that new painter, oh, what's he called, then taking in a musical, perhaps the 'Woman in White', Chris got tickets, how marvellous, oh how sweet, you know I love musicals, oh just get a cab from the tennis club, it'll be quicker, oh and Mummy and Daddy want us over for dinner on Friday, can you make it? Etc. Etc.

Talking of psychopaths

Talking of psychopaths I thought that Bryan Ferry was very good in Breakfast in Pluto.

Anytime someone involved in that film wants to let me a flat in Mayfair for £250/week, feel free to PM me.

confucius said:

I think this is why it's so alarming and scary more than other films with unrealistic designation of bad people vs. good people.

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This is a theme of Allen's - Crimes and Misdemeanours is built around it. I think it's his best film.

What, all rich people, that can't be true?
Seems to be right to say that someone from London will have a different view of this film to someone from the US although I haven't seen it (my flatmate warned me that it was dreadful). I wonder if I would have a different impression of other foreign (to me) films if I knew more about where they were set, for example I heard that the accents in the Cohen Brothers' Fargo are actually terrible but because I don't know any better that isn't a problem for me.

IdleRich said:

What, all rich people, that can't be true?
Seems to be right to say that someone from London will have a different view of this film to someone from the US although I haven't seen it (my flatmate warned me that it was dreadful). I wonder if I would have a different impression of other foreign (to me) films if I knew more about where they were set, for example I heard that the accents in the Cohen Brothers' Fargo are actually terrible but because I don't know any better that isn't a problem for me.

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Well, I don't need to know that the accents are off to hate the Coen Bros (Grand Wizards of empty PoMo bullshit)... but that's another story....

Yes, I wondered exactly the same thing when I saw Match Point. Does New York look as fake and stilted to its residents as London looked in Match Point to me?

The appalling, absurd dialogue didn't trouble me that much; it gave the film an uncanny quality, though I admit, not in a good way. It was odd to see all those British actors speaking lines that no British person - actually scrub that, that no person of ANY nationality - would ever say. You had this peculiar, slipshod vision of England ventriloquized by Brit actors; it made for an unsettling experience. But, then again, it's not as if contemporary British cinema is any more convincing.

Can Allen's being American fully account for the ridiculousness of the script though? I mean, does he think that any patrician patriarchal businessman-fixer type in the world ANYWHERE says things like 'he's a very thoughtful young man! why we just had a conversation about dostoevsky!' Isn't his allowing this sort of thing through the net more to do with his age than his nationality? He's clearly past it if he thinks that a sentence like that isn't risible.

It's not that this is a cliched image of the upper classes. Ye gods, it's a frankly BIZARRE image of them; like a vision of the upper classes cobbled together by a malfunctioning low-quality AI using only a few disconnected fragments from thirty years ago.

The whole thing was like Crimes and Misdemeanours lite crossed with Richard Curtis' Notting Hill.

Plus, Cosmo Landesman in the Sunday Times made a good point: the film's portentous tennis imagery - LOOK tennis is based on CHANCE - is preposterous because tennis isn't, actually. It would be hard to think of any other game LESS determined by luck than tennis. I mean, even if you do hit a ball and it teeters on the net and falls back your side, it's not really a question of luck but that you didn't hit the ball accurately enough. So Allen seemed as bewildered about tennis as he is about the upper classes.

That said, I sort of enjoyed it. But more in the way I enjoy low quality, undemanding TV thrillers.

k-punk said:

Well, I don't need to know that the accents are off to hate the Coen Bros (Grand Wizards of empty PoMo bullshit)... but that's another story....

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you've got me intrigued now, because i rate fargo and blood simple. whats wrong with the coen brothers?

"Well, I don't need to know that the accents are off to hate the Coen Bros (Grand Wizards of empty PoMo bullshit)... but that's another story...."

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"you've got me intrigued now, because i rate fargo and blood simple. whats wrong with the coen brothers?"

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Not that i particularly want to jump in and predict K-punk's response, but probably in the sense that despite the importance with which they are feted, particularly with regards to an intellectual realignment of genre and understanding of cinema in general, watching their films (most of, not all: Fargo, Big Lebowski and Barton Fink i still have fond memories of for various reasons) is like watching thin air. Characters you couldn't give a toss about being a stock in trade.
Sometimes Allen's films give you this same 'washing over' effect, sometimes in a good, blissful way, others in a completely inconsequential, forgot-i-watched it way. The Man Who Wasn't There probably about sums it up.
Think i'll give Match Point a miss by the look of it.

I liked the crap dialogue - it reminded me of Woody Allen films, and some of the real people I know. I liked the ham-fisted locations because they reminded me to get off my arse and visit the real New York. But then I don't see why people in fillms have to talk the way they do in real life.

I also liked the tennis. That is, it was a half-baked theme, barely maintained. That only made me even more prone to fall for the false symmetry of the ball and the bracelet bouncing back: oh god I thought, all those tennis references, for this? So I was suckered, and on the rebound it made the real outcome seem completely inevitable.

It was almost enough to make me forgive that godawful scene in the rain