Released last year, Woody Allen's Whatever Works was one of the septuagenarian filmmaker's most avidly anticipated films. Not only did it mark a kind of homecoming for the nebbish auteur—after several years making movies on the other side of the Atlantic, of which the most recent, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, was undoubtedly the best, Allen was back in New York City, his home town and the setting of his greatest works—but also because it stars Larry David, the irascible co-creator of Seinfeld and star of HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm. Allen has cast David in his films before—most notably in 1987's Radio Days—but the fact that it has taken him so long to put him in a leading role is somehow inconceivable. As New York Magazine observed at the time of the film's release, the pair are in many ways "the last of the schlemiels," representing a style of Jewish-American humour—"neurotic, depressive, abrasive, excluded"—that is on its way out in the face of what the magazine labelled the "Reform Jewish humour" of Jon Stewart, Judd Apatow, Sarah Silverman and others. As a result, the tone of Whatever Works—the story of a suicidal professor of quantum mechanics, Boris Yellnikoff, whose life is turned upside down for the better with the arrival on his doorstep of a naive and God-fearing southern belle—is in many ways old-fashioned, neurotic where Stewart is confident and depressive where Apatow is hopeful. Written in the 1970s and only cursorily updated to the present, it is also in many ways vintage Allen, closer to the filmmaker's work of his breakout decade than to anything he's made in the past two or three. Whatever Works screens at Curtin House's Rooftop Cinema on Tuesday and is followed on Thursday by Jean-Luc Godard's Sympathy for the Devil, a radical piece of 60s cinema that inter cuts footage of the Rolling Stones recording their masterpiece with a series of sketches exploring, among other things, Marxist-Leninism and Black Power. The final sequence was disowned by Godard, whose own version of the film, One Plus One, contains a much more ascetic—one might even say Maoist—ending, but is nonetheless outstanding: surrounded by a film crew, an actress playing a female militant is gunned down on a beach before being spattered with red paint by Godard himself and raised into the air on a camera crane. The final recording of the Stones' song, which Godard cut from his version of the film, plays over the top of the footage as the squeaky British narrator intones: "Yes, it was all a waste of time. I've got to do something, got to get out of this place. So long."

Review, 20 February 2010