Be that as it may, the front-page coverage by The New York Times, a newspaper whose core audience consists of people who positively adore the witty foreign-films-lite of the type Allen once offered, was a watershed moment: in a sense, a long-delayed eulogy over a corpse that had been awaiting interment for years. Nothing if not resilient, the feisty auteur trundled off to Britain in the hope of reviving his career. The result was a glum trio of daft London films: the sycophantic, culturally benighted Match Point, the paleolithic murder mystery Scoop, and the lugubrious drama Cassandra's Dream. Allen, who had complained vociferously about Hollywood's crass obsession with big-budget films, was hoping that his diehard European fans would flock to his latest offerings, thereby shaming his compatriots back home into revising their opinion of his recent work. This tactic paid off with Match Point, a deceptively repugnant film that did shockingly well at the box office considering its shallow premise and asinine plot, but Scoop was not a hit.

The water having run dry at this particular oasis, Allen then moseyed along to Spain, where he began shooting Vicky Cristina Barcelona, which debuted at the Cannes Film Festival. The cast includes Penelope Cruz, Javier Bardem and Scarlett Johansson, very possibly the only actor on the planet more annoying on screen than Allen himself. Americans can be blamed for many things, but the perpetuation of Allen's zombie-like career is one atrocity for which we refuse to be held accountable. It is Europeans who are providing much of the money for these projects, Europeans who are welcoming the director to their communities, Europeans who are marching through the turnstiles in support of Allen's interchangeably neurasthenic films. Europeans are the ones paying the freight for Allen's cavalcade of duds. To those of us who have watched Allen's two-decade decline into that cataleptic Eric Claptonesque state where an artist is revered as a god, but not by anyone who originally worshipped in his church, Allen's Grand Tour of Europe is baffling. I have seen Match Point three times now and cannot keep a straight face during Allen's perplexing and in many ways offensive attempt to make a Mike Leigh movie. The film is ostensibly about class: a penniless Irish former tennis star (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) is determined to rise above his station by reading Dostoevsky, attending La Traviata and Damien Hirst shows and marrying Emily Mortimer.

Unfortunately, Allen gets it all wrong: when you shoot a Mike Leigh movie, you aren't supposed to make Mummy and Papa and their grouse-shooting twit progeny the heroes. And when you repeatedly show Mummy and Papa and Twitty and Tweedledum at Covent Garden going into raptures over Verdi, you can't then have Mortimer salivating at the prospect of attending Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Woman In White. It makes you look like an idiot. Here, as in so many other Allen films, art, music and literature serve a phony, ornamental function; you never really believe that any of his characters actually enjoy abstract art or have read Aristophanes. It's just an excuse for the college drop-out Allen to show off. "Look, Mom! I know who Modigliani is! See, I can pronounce the word 'Proust'." Match Point is like a dozen other Allen movies: Low-Fat High Culture; Bergman for Beginners. In the follow-up Allen made the disastrous decision to cast Johansson in the role that had previously been played by Louise Lasser, Diane Keaton and Mia Farrow - actresses who can actually act. He made the equally disastrous decision to cast himself as her sidekick, a klutzy third-rate magician, after officially taking the hint and stopping casting himself opposite nubile young women in romantic situations where he got to paw them for a few hours. Scoop has Allen and Johansson sharing the screen together most of the time, with the dapper male lead Hugh Jackman twiddling his thumbs off-camera.

In other words, Allen - who clearly has no idea how cadaverously gross he looks on screen at this juncture, who simply cannot accept that he is not the second coming of Groucho Marx - was back to his old tricks as The Dirty Old Man with a Heart of Gold. The laughs seeming to have dried up, Allen next cranked out Cassandra's Dream, a grim tale about two brothers who decide to begin second careers and become the most inept hitmen in the history of south London. The film is essentially a meditation on the meaning of life, which raises the interesting question of why it is set in south London. There is no law against making movies about amateur working-class hitmen, just as there is no law against making movies about shotgun-toting tennis stars masquerading as Notting Hill burglars who quote Sophocles to spectral apparitions. But if people on that side of the Atlantic are going to keep funding this hokum, they're going to have to accept the responsibility. My greatest worry is that Allen will keep this European tour going for the rest of his life, dropping in on one gullible country after another, making a couple of locally financed films and then blowing town before the stench hits. I can see a Zagreb-based Woody Allen film where the director plays a washed-up Serb stand-up comic whose career is suddenly revived by meeting a perky Bosnian-American exchange student played by Thandie Newton. I can see a Polish Woody Allen film about a washed-up klezmer player whose career is revived by a chance encounter with a Santa Cruz forensic scientist (Tina Fey) investigating Chopin's suspicious death. I can see a Macedonian film about a social-climbing rag merchant who keeps getting visits from a ghost who claims to be Alexander the Great, but is actually a delusional Second Avenue deli counter man named Herbie Schlegel. I can see this thing going on and on, year after year, forever. Don't blame us, Europe. We warned you.

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