The climax of Stardust Memories is a perfection. A woman whom the hero loves looks toward him, into the camera, and smiles. Her expression evolves over the course of the shot, smiling almost in embarrassment at times, and we know that the hero is looking at her and that she is self-conscious because he loves her and this is why she smiles. The hero says in voiceover “I don’t know, I guess it was a combination of everything, the sound of the music, and the breeze, and how beautiful Dorrie looked to me, and for one brief moment everything just seemed to come together perfectly, and I felt happy.” This is a perfect moment.
Though the film’s central narrative consists of Allen’s typical hero struggling with his neuroses in an 8 ½-inspired phantasmagoria, it returns perpetually to scenes of his doomed romance with the woman of that perfect moment. In the woman’s withdrawn expressions and the characters’ pointed conversations, these scenes suggest the history of a complex relationship. One scene, a sequence of close-ups fractured by rapid jump-cuts, shows the woman breaking down in a moment of anguish more brutally direct and painfully sympathetic than anything else in Allen’s filmography, undulled by his usual cynicism. These scenes possess an emotional weight that anchors Allen’s neuroses.
The wonder of the perfect moment is that it incorporates all of this within itself. It is perfect because the hero reflects upon it as it occurs but he is equally reflected into it. He is aware of himself and his happiness, and he is aware that he gladdens the one he loves—and under her gaze he realizes that he is this happy person who gladdens her. Distances are dissolved. But this reflectivity relies on the characters’ relationship; indeed, the entire history of that relationship is implicit in their mutual gaze, and its context provides the elation of the moment for both the characters and the audience. (And all of this is doubly reflected, since the woman looks at us and we recall similar scenes from our own lives even as we reflect on the hero.) Thus, the moment carries the past with it; and it is also carried into the future, as an emblem and enfolding of times past that defines Allen’s experiences ever afterward. It is not merely perfect: it makes perfect. It is a moment of stillness that draws time around itself.
Stardust Memories is a reverie for such moments. With its bubbling jazz, its glimmering cinematography, its comic hyperbole, and its exuberant dissolution of the bounds between film and life, it tells us of the beauty dancing in the cracks of our misery. In its most charming moment of delirium, a group of UFO-watchers are rewarded with hot-air balloons drifting through the sky with a sublime languor, and humanity’s search for meaning is transmuted into an appreciation of the beautiful things in life. Better than any of Allen’s other films, it expresses the bittersweet philosophy that has run through all of them: existence is filled with suffering, and there is no grand meaning in the world to justify it; the world’s essence is its arbitrariness, and our principal trouble is being born into it—but there are moments of happiness to be found, and there are beautiful balloons in the sky.
Tags: favorites, movies, perfect moments, Woody Allen
