Review: 'You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger' is tangled retread

Film: You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger (A)
Cast: Naomi Watts, Josh Brolin, Anthony Hopkins, Antonio Banderas, Frieda Pinto, Anna Friel
Director: Woody Allen
Rating:  *  *  ½

Woody Allen with 40 films behind him embarks on yet another familiar tangled retread and there’s nothing new to be had either. His semi-autobiographical world is as skewed as ever, the moral compass decadent and rotting away on the inside and the sentiment just as usual, wry and matter of fact.

The film opens with an unseen narrator(Zak Orth) paraphrasing Shakespeare, about how life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Helena(Gemma Jones) finds herself bereft and alone when her husband Alfie (Anthony Hopkins) divorces her to embark on the youthful pursuits of a much younger wife Charmaine (Lucy Punch) and a gym body. Their daughter Sally (Naomi Watts) supports her wannabe successful, one-book wonder, husband, Roy (Josh Brolin) while he frolics around with younger women in the hope of finding some miraculous inspiration. 

One of his obsessions is Dia (Frieda Pinto) who breaks up with her fiancée to romance with Roy. Gallery owner, Sally’s employer and crush, Greg (Antonio Banderas), is yet another ageing romeo with a troubled marriage, who is seeking the arms of a younger woman, an artist protégé of Sally’s.

The only man who appears content to pursue a woman, Helena, nearer his age, is Jonathan (Roger Ashton Griffiths), but he too has the baggage of a dear departed wife whose spirit he needs to consult before committing to marriage again. Now where does that leave the women? They are either neurotic, self-seeking or faking it for a comfortable co-existence.

The title of the film merely alludes to the desperately seeking nature of human relationships be it for happiness or romance- but both don’t ever go hand-in-hand, at least not in Allen’s cynical celluloid world.

The titular allusion to fate and fortunetelling, finds expression in Helena’s dependency on a charlatan fortune reader and her interest in books on the occult. 

Allen continues to reiterate, in film after film, and in this one too, that our existence is meaningless. He keeps the narrative buoyant through an amusing series of coincidences, a few stinging reversals and some half-way surprises. 

There is beauty, irony, sarcasm, regret and philosophising in Allen’s screenplay but none of those themes are played out with any significantly satisfying impact. Each of the actors, from the stalwarts to the newbies, do a competent job to keep this relationship-play interesting.

Allen’s impeccable dialogue with it’s all-too-brief doses of humour and Vilmos Zsigmonds entreating cinematography add to it. While it lasts, the 98 minute runtime is inveigling enough but once the film ends(abruptly at that), there is just no aftertaste, or any feeling that you have just witnessed something monumental!