Take the Bananas and Run

So why go on? "I can't really come up with a good argument to choose life over death," he says. "Except that I'm too scared." Making films offers no reward beyond distracting him from his plight. He claims the payoff is in the process—"I need to be focused on something so I don't see the big picture"—and he is indifferent to reviews. "I was never bothered if a film was not well received," he says, admitting that some, such as "The Curse of the Jade Scorpion," are not great. "But the converse of that is that I never get a lot of pleasure out of it if it is. So it isn't like you can say, 'He's an uncompromising artist.' That's not true. I'm a compromising person, definitely. It's that I don't get much from either side."

When it is suggested that others may get a great deal out of his films—that there are fans for whom an afternoon watching "Love and Death" or "Manhattan" provides solace in the way a Marx Brothers film soothes a depressed character in "Hannah and Her Sisters"—he resists the compliment. "This can happen, and this is a nice thing, but when you leave the theater, you're still going back out into a very cruel world."

As a filmmaker, he knows that audiences need a respite from the darkness of his vision—he wanted to end "Hannah and Her Sisters" with his character alone, having been dumped by Hannah's sister, but thought viewers wouldn't go for such a bleak conclusion. In real life, however, he believes there are no happy endings. "It's like the beginning of 'Stardust Memories.' The trains all go to the same place," he says. (And no, that place is not "jazz heaven," as a character in that film hopes.) "They all go to the dump."

Death may be especially on Allen's mind at the moment—his idol, Ingmar Bergman, died while he was shooting "Vicky Cristina Barcelona," as did director Michelangelo Antonioni. His longtime producer, Charles Joffe, passed away recently as well. "Your perception of time changes as you get older, because you see how brief everything is," he says. "You see how meaningless … I don't want to depress you, but it's a meaningless little flicker."

Oddly, listening to him is not depressing. If anything, there's something refreshing in his resistance to the platitudes about simple things making life worthwhile that so often pass for philosophy. It's not that Allen is unable to enjoy himself (though he did want to title "Annie Hall" "Anhedonia," which means the inability to experience pleasure); it's that he's convinced the moments don't add up to redemption. "You have a meal, or you listen to a piece of music, and it's a pleasurable thing," he says. "But it doesn't accrue to anything."

He feels this ethos is expressed in "Vicky Cristina": "The feeling you come away with is to have had a nice time, to have been in the presence of a pretty city and pretty people, and that's fine. But when you step back and analyze the details, it is pessimistic." While a more optimistic reading might suggest the characters gain some wisdom from their romantic adventures, regardless of the outcome, Allen's take is characteristically bleak: "At the end of the picture it seems to me everyone was unhappy," he says.

His next film, his first shot in New York after four abroad, is a comedy starring Larry David. "I once thought there was a good argument between whether it's worth it to make a film where you confront the human condition, or an escape film," he says. "You could argue that the Fred Astaire film is performing a greater service than the Bergman film, because Bergman is dealing with a problem that you're never going to solve. Whereas Fred Astaire, you walk in off the street, and for an hour and half they're popping champagne corks and making light banter and you get refreshed, like a lemonade." And then, of course, it's back out to the street, where the universe is random and life has no meaning, but you might as well take care with your banana, just in case.

© 2008