Two Woody Allen moments, more than 35 years apart. In the new film To Rome With Love, an old man — a shuffling, white-haired version of one of modern cinema’s most recognisable profiles — delivers a quasi-philosophical monologue in a familiar, nervous-tic-ridden style, ending with a little shrug and the remark that, of course, death probably won’t come to him for another 40 or 50 years at least! The line invites a laugh, but the chuckles stick in one’s throat.
In the other scene I’m thinking about — from the 1975 film Love and Death — a much younger Allen, playing a character named Boris, speaks directly into the camera. Having just been executed by firing squad and now preparing to trail the Grim Reaper into the great unknown, Boris is understandably preoccupied with such subjects as Death, Life, God and insurance salesmen, and offers us a deadpan meditation on these things (“the key here I think is to not think of death as an end, but to think of it as a very effective way of cutting down on your expenses”). Then, in one of the funniest closing shots of any film, Boris and the Reaper perform a demented Danse Macabre through the woods together.
Similar though their tones are — and so characteristic of Allen’s work — the two scenes mentioned above produce very dissimilar effects. Watching a 76-year-old pontificate about death is a markedly different experience from watching the same man doing so in his 30s or 40s. It’s less easy to smile at.
Allen himself would not condone such a treacly attitude, but for a long-time viewer these feelings are inevitable. One can spend half a lifetime admiring certain movie-stars for their toughness or their lack of sentimentality (“lack of sentimentality” itself being a meaninglessly broad category that can include Woody Allen’s Borises and Alvys as well as Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harrys and Blondies) — but as time passes they become vulnerable in one’s eyes. They may continue doing the same things onscreen but the way we receive and interpret those things changes. As Pauline Kael wrote about Katharine Hepburn and Bette Davis in 1968, “The two great heroines of American talkies have become old dears — a little crotchety maybe, but that only makes them more harmlessly lovable.”
There have been exceptions: film artists whose work grew determinedly less sentimental with age — the most notable being that wily surrealist Luis Bunuel, who made some of his sharpest films in his seventies. And indeed there are Bunuel-esque touches in To Rome with Love, such as a scene where an apparently shy, star-struck young woman accompanies a famous actor to his hotel room and ends up romping in bed with a thief who has broken in. But despite these moments — and the overall cheerfulness of the film — I found it hard to shake from my mind the images of a frail-looking Allen, the skin on his face sagging, the eyes slightly more unfocused and the speech just a little slower than it used to be.
I felt similarly odd a few weeks ago while watching the US Open men’s final, a five-hour marathon that was nearly as fatiguing for spectators as it was for the contestants. In the audience was Sean Connery — Sir Sean Connery — lending support to his countryman Andy Murray; he looked as spry and bright-eyed as ever, but I spent nearly as much time worrying about his health as I did thinking about the match itself. As the long rallies wore on, he transformed in my mind’s eye from being one of the world’s most charismatic movie stars, the original Bond, to being a crabby, tired old man needing to take yet another toilet break and wishing these youngsters would get on with it. You can be the fittest 82-year-old in the world, but you’re still 82.
As for Amitabh Bachchan turning 70 next month — that’s such an incogitable prospect for my generation of Hindi-movie viewers, I won’t even address it in this space. It may require a book-sized lament.
Jai Arjun Singh is a Delhi-based writer