Mia Farrow, The Purple Rose of Cairo

Wednesday, April 06, 2005

Stephen Schiff

“In The Purple Rose of Cairo, Mia Farrow gawks and stammers and cranes her pipe-cleaner neck. She's doing an impression but of whom? Diane Keaton? Don Knotts? Then it dawns on you. She's Woody Allen, of course, the old, panic-stricken Woody Allen, the one who was so self-disgusted and so maladroit with women that you could never believe it when he finally got the girl. It seemed a sort of fairy-tale convention: the ungainly beast would turn out to be a handsome prince, and everyone would live happily ever after. But Allen's camera won't let Farrow be beastly; his cinematographer, Gordon Willis, makes her heart-shaped face a disk of amber light against the drabs and mud browns of the movie's Depression setting. When she klutzes around, Woody-style, she doesn't look inept; she looks coltish. When she stutters and haws, she's not an urban-neurotic basket case; she's girlish and plucky, and her piping voice is like the young Judy Garland's. In short, Farrow is charming, but not funny--just like the movie….

“Whatever substance The Purple Rose of Cairo has comes from Allen's rueful willingness to face fact. He's an Oscar winner now, the commander in chief of the best table at Elaine's--he can't keep pretending he's the outsider looking in. So in The Purple Rose of Cairo he lets Mia Farrow play the Woody Allen character. This way, the plight of the Jewish misfit becomes the plight of pre-feminist woman, brutalized, not by Gentiles, but by an unfeeling husband, an unfeeling employer, a bankrupt society….

“In a movie full of shapely performances, Daniels's is the shapeliest….”

Stephen Schiff
Vanity Fair, February 1984
[re-check rest of review]

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