Film Review | To Rome With Love

To Rome With Love is a terrible title. It's the kind of title that even the least imaginative of copyrighters would cringe to attach to a run-of-the-mill article... let alone a lavish Woody Allen comedy romp through the titular city, complete with an impressive (if expected) panoply of ensemble talents.

But though even Allen claims to deeply dislike the title of his latest film - another instalment in his unofficial 'Euro Trip' series, following up one of his most loved and lucrative films to date, Midnight in Paris - and has confessed it to be a concession to his Italian financial backers, the fact that he bowed down and slapped it on anyway is telling.

We meet American tourist Hayley (Alison Pill), who falls in love with a socially-conscious aspiring lawyer Michelangelo (Flavio Parenti); the naïve country-bumpkin newlyweds Antonio (Alessandro Tiberi) and Milly (Alessandra Mastronardi); young architect Jack (Jesse Eisenberg), his possibly ghostly architectural idol and romantic mentor John (Alec Baldwin), his girlfriend Sally (Greta Gerwig) and Sally's alluring best friend, the actress Monica (Ellen Page). Then there's Leopoldo (Roberto Benigni) - an office worker whose life takes an inexplicable turn one morning.

Supposed hilarity ensues when: as predicted, Jack falls in love with Monica, Antonio mistakenly gets sent a beautiful prostitute Anna (Penelope Cruz) to his hotel room while Milly is away (on her part, she gets entangled in a romantic bind of her own); Hayley and Michelangelo's fathers - played by Allen himself and Fabio Armiliato - hit upon a unique money-making scheme and Leopoldo wakes up to find himself an overnight celebrity, assailed by paparazzi at every turn.

This is Allen working while completely lodged in a comfort zone, coasting on warm and pleasant backdrops and the natural charisma of his cast to create a deliberately shallow, occasionally amusing but entirely forgettable cinematic experience.

It's a throwaway film, not least because it's made up of a number of separate mini-stories that never really meet. Though this made be true of most Hollywood comedies, with Allen - a prolific, hit-and-miss filmmaker, and more so in recent years - you're always left hoping that he'll let slip another one of his masterpieces.

This is not to say that the film doesn't have a kind of gliding, pleasant (if slightly overlong) rhythm to it, nor that it is completely devoid of Allen's trademark wit.

But the gags that hit home are few and far between, and the vignette structure never quite allows you to become immersed in any one of the many characters, and neither does it give Allen time to play on the kind of sexual dynamics that he's known for, and that have in the past helped him create classics of American cinema.

Like Match Point, Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Midnight in Paris, To Rome With Love is yet another Allen film funded by the country in which it is set.

This isn't a problem if the films in question are intrinsically good - even if they may easily double up as tourist-baiting propaganda - but Allen's Roman Holiday feels like exactly that: a holiday from filmmaking, devoid of anything worth mentioning or remembering, and relying on lazy tricks that have become second nature to the seasoned auteur.