But Allen might have expanded the character and given her a more dramatic and complicated temperament. Her Sophie seems a fake, yet those big blue eyes do appear to see more than ordinary mortals can see. When she has a vision, Stone raises her arms in carny style and flutters her eyelids. At first, you can’t quite figure Sophie out.
It’s an accomplished, stately movie-unimpassioned but pleasing.Įmma Stone’s Sophie is the only wild card, and I wish that she were wilder.
But the swank is held in place by Allen’s instinctive classicism: the camera that gently recedes as the actors walk toward it the long-lasting immovable shots as people talk and talk. In a dangerous and incomprehensible world, elegance and luxury are a stable value for him, and, perhaps, a refuge. At one point, Firth and Stone drive along the Riviera in a red Alfa Romeo, and the audience may feel a twinge: Cary Grant and Grace Kelly zipped along the same coast sixty years ago, in “To Catch a Thief.” Beauty-old beauty, permanent beauty-has become an emotional necessity in Allen’s work. film, with old CinemaScope lenses, achieves a soft, lemon-tinted light. The renowned cinematographer Darius Khondji, shooting on 35-mm. In “Magic,” he shot scenes of the Catledge home at the Villa Eilenroc, in Cap d’Antibes, and at the Villa la Renardière, in Mouans-Sartoux, and he lays on the dignified glamour-the lawns and gardens, the blooming trellised walkways, the damasked interiors. It’s his show.Īllen has been having a prolonged, bankable, gravely appreciative fling with Old Europe. But Firth, in a broad-ranging performance-from rage to enchantment and back again-carries it through. At times, the movie sounds like an overwritten drawing-room comedy from eighty years ago, or like Shaw without the irony. Will she marry her fatuous suitor? Or will she intrigue the older man, who thinks that she’s a criminal? As romantic comedy, “Magic in the Moonlight” is formulaic you can see the plot reversals before they come. The rest of the time, Sophie puts up with the crooning young Brice Catledge (Hamish Linklater), the scion of the family, who serenades her with a ukulele. Catledge, which makes his loving widow happy. At séances, the well-paid Sophie summons the late Mr. It seems that a beautiful young American medium, Sophie Baker (Emma Stone), and her mother (Marcia Gay Harden) have taken up residence at the magnificent country home of the wealthy Catledge family. Illustration by Conor Langton.Īn old friend and fellow-magician (Simon McBurney) summons him to the South of France.
Colin Firth leads the cast of Woody Allen’s new film, set on the French Riviera.
0 kommentar(er)
