Crossed Connections

CAST: Josh Brolin,Naomi Watts,Antonio Banderas,Anthony Hopkins***

Put Woody Allen in the role of any of the men who are in this film and it would have been a whole different movie. Even perhaps compensated for the fact that You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger doesn’t really have any kind of an ending. The pleasure in an Allen film has always been how he takes us there,his protagonists mostly struggling with life’s little odds and emerging a little,ever so little,wiser.That arc of a journey is missing here. The couples in this film are all growing apart in their own ways but when they do fall out,it is to fall into a new set of bigger problems,and abandoned to their own miseries. The biggest problem,however,is the sheer mundane-ness — be it the dialogues,the characters or how the relationships (an Allen speciality) proceed. You Will Meet… jumps from one couple to another with the help of a lazy narrator who never goes further than stating the obvious.The writer-director could have once done so much with a woman fortune teller who is obviously fleecing a character with mild doses of whiskey and pedestrian advice. But she is largely left unchallenged. He could have also done so much with the role played by Anthony Hopkins of a 60-plus,reasonably rich father of one,who decides to give up his wife of 40 years to rediscover his youth. But Hopkins plays him in all seriousness,promptly falls for a call girl,showers money and gets married,and hopes she would give him the son he never had. That call girl plays into all the clichés: blond,brash,skimpy-clothed,and bird-brained.The sarcastic-comic voice of American cinema that is Allen,is,in fact,nowhere to be heard in this film based in London. The only guy who gives some hint of the tragi-comedy that pervades their situations is Antonio Banderas,as a gallery owner playing both the mildly flirtatious boss and the serious professional.The woman who falls for his well-tuned charms is Sally (Watts),the daughter of Alfie (Hopkins) and Helena (Jones). Since Alfie walked out on her,it’s Helena who finds that the only thing that consoles her is sessions with the fortune teller,Crystal.Helena has the meatiest role of all since she starts off as a sorry,suicidal woman and ends up dangerously psychotic,clinging to anything that could give her comfort in her lonely old life,from fortune tellers to reincarnation theories to getting a dead woman’s approval for marrying the latter’s husband.Sally,who works for the gallery owner,is married to struggling writer Roy (Brolin),whose first book showed promise but who hasn’t produced anything else yet.In comes Dia,the beauty at the window,who gives Roy solace at a time when he and Sally have taken to fighting over the most trivial of matters originating from his minimal contribution to household finances. His interactions with Sally’s mother Helena,in which she consistently predicts his book’s failure quoting Crystal,regardless of his protests,show some promise of what this film could have been.As for Pinto,she is the girl in the window — as the film says,the “tall,dark stranger that we all eventually meet”. She is pretty,warm and unremarkable,but plays the guitar in a red slip and is doing a PhD in musicology. Plus,she always keeps her window open. It’s she who symbolises the hope in our life of daily drudgery. After all,how many such strangers fall your way? shalini.langer@expressindia.com