Four random tales set in modern day Rome. Only if you’re Woody Allen can you pull off what is essentially silly romantic musings about love and life with such aplomb. It also helps that Allen is back on the big screen as his usual neurotic self—yes, it’s been done to death, but when you’re as funny as Allen, with To Rome with Love being essentially a lightweight, absurd farce (you’d be disappointed if you expect anything more)—that combination actually works wonders.
Allen is a hoot in the first story as retired opera director and promoter Jerry. He and his long-suffering wife Phyllis (Judy Davis, equally funny), during a vacation to Rome to meet their daughter Hayley (Alison Pill) and future son-in-law Michelangelo (Flavio Parenti), learn that Michelangelo’s father Giancarlo (Fabio Armiliato), a mortician, has a beautiful operatic voice. There’s a catch: Giancarlo can only sing when he’s showering, so Jerry concocts a ridiculous opera that features Giancarlo singing out of a shower box on stage in every scene—the film’s funniest (and finest) moment.
The rest of the vignettes are as equally far out with varying degrees of success: Penelope Cruz brilliantly sashays her way through one as a prostitute who sexes up a new-in-town young man after his wife goes missing; Alec Baldwin teams up with Jesse Eisenberg and Ellen Page in a treatise on temptation and forbidden love (with Baldwin personifying Eisenberg’s voice of reason, warning the younger man of the big mistake that he is about to make); and Roberto Benigni plays an everyday man who suddenly falls prey to the unwanted and fickle attentions of the media for absolutely no reason. It is exactly the outlandishness of the whole proceeding that makes To Rome with Love so entertaining and a delight to watch, replete with enough melodrama to fill a tabloid.
Sure, the characters are a little thin with so much going on but, once again, Allen draws on a precarious concoction of the stereotypical and the insightful, and the realistic and the magical, with a lightness of touch that’s all his own. Make no mistake, To Rome with Love is no masterpiece, but a colorful tableaux of romance in all its magnificent splendor (cinematographer Darius Khondji creates a stunning, light-filled version of Rome that pays tribute to the city’s rich cinematic heritage) and mishaps. Treats aplenty if you decide to leave your brains at home.
