Melinda and Melinda

Introduction

In a New York restaurant, a group of writers is having a discussion about life (well, this is a Woody Allen film), and how situations may be both tragic and comic at the same time - much like having to supress the urge to laugh in a funeral. One begins a story about a young girl (Melinda) who gatecrashes a dinner party being given by her old school friends and their respective partners. It is revealed that in the years since they last saw each other, Melinda has gone through a failed marriage and a suicide attempt...

All of a sudden, another writer pipes up and says he can see the possibility of a subtle comic romance from this beginning, and here the story splits, with `tragic` Melinda living her life, and `comedy` Melinda living hers - but for narration`s sake, `comedy` Melinda enters the lives of another group of people……

Video

Being a very recent release, the picture is a good as expected with no noticeable defects at all. The film is presented in Widescreen Anamorphic 1:85.

Audio

The sound is clear and crisp throughout, and the soundtrack contains a nice mix of standard jazz tracks but we also get some classical music this time - had better brush up on your Bartok and Stravinsky!

Features

Extras? On a Woody Allen DVD? Well, it`ll happen one day I`m sure.

Conclusion

If you`ve seen `The Double Life of Véronique`, or `Sliding Doors` then you`ll have some idea about how this film is structured, with Allen stamping his own identity on things straight away in amongst the pseudo-intellectual mumblings of the New York restaurant set.

The two Melindas, in a very convincing performance by Radha Mitchell (with no hint of an Aussie accent), are effectively two different people, being as they are thought up by two different people. This makes it easier for Allen to build up the plot (s) without getting too convoluted, although there are aspects of the stories (rubbing the lamp, playing the piano and falling for a pianist, eating at the same compact and bijou French bistro and trying to leap out of the window to kill yourself) which may get you thinking `Ah yes! Very clever!`, or may just just seem a blatant contrivance to remind you that something, however vague, is connecting the two stories.

The cast do very well with what they`re given (Jonny Lee Miller, however appears a little wooden), but then what they are given is (and I hope I`m not being too cruel) a vague rehash of `Annie and Her Sisters` with the tragi-comedy elements split into two parallel plot lines.

The script could be from no other director, being filled as it is with some hilarious one-liners and relationship issues we have seen several times before in his films. The role of Hobie (Will Ferrell) is clearly someone Allen would have played himself had he been younger, and Ferrell battles well to stamp his own style onto it, but you can`t help imagine on screen a small guy with glasses and a fast approaching anxiety attack.

Overall, I would have preferred the film to have been one story, fleshing out of one of the plots we have (using elements of the other) so we could have had a fuller picture of the characters involved, but as things are, everyone is a little too one-dimensional and conform nicely to the Woody Allen stereotypes on which he can lay down his script.

Having said all that, I actually enjoyed this enormously, but it`s definitely not in the same league as `Sweet and Lowdown`, and the `moral` of the story is too obvious. In the end, I think we`ve just seen it all before.