To Rome with Love - review

Allen's stale Roman adventure fails to live up to "Midnight in Paris"
p47 To Roime with Love
14 September 2012

If you can think of a cliché about Rome and Romans that isn’t in Woody Allen’s latest journey around Europe, you’re a better man than I am. “The eternal city never changes,” someone says at one point. Nor does Allen’s latter-day propensity to go with the most facile flow possible.

This one has absolutely everything on the soundtrack, from Verdi to Volare, and opens with a traffic cop breaking off from his job to tell us that there are so many stories to be culled from Rome that he hardly knows where to start.

Allen appears as a reluctantly retired opera director, with Judy Davis as his wife, who tells him that his most slated work is “before its time”. He’s come to Rome to meet the Left-wing boyfriend (Flavio Parenti) of his daughter (Alison Pill) and says he could never be a Communist because he “couldn’t share a bathroom”.

He discovers the boyfriend’s undertaker father (Fabio Armiliato) can sing beautifully — but only in the shower. So he arranges an opera production which has him taking a permanent scrub on stage. There are other tall tales involving Alec Baldwin as a tourist and Penélope Cruz as an incompetent prostitute.

Whereas Midnight in Paris was freshly imagined (and became Allen’s most successful movie ever), this stale and flaccid exercise looks as if it has come from one of those old notebooks in which he keeps discarded ideas.

Cert 12A, 112 mins

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in