You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger

A Woody Allen romantic comedy minus the wacky humour and curiosity the director is famous for

The determinants of a Woody Allen movie—financial and creative control not negotiable—mean that he is now compelled to move his locations out of New York and into Europe. Which is a shame, but not always; Vicky Cristina Barcelona worked beautifully with its Spanish/ English slanging duels. But You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger is set in London and about ‘propah’ English inappropriateness, ever so often interrupted by the inaptness of foreign extraction—a loud American,  an enticing Indian, a temperamental  European.

Allen is over his head in this one. The natural English reserve of London is in opposition to every wacky Yiddish joke that he knows. Even though some of the conversation in this tale of straying mortals bound by the vows of unholy matrimony is lovely to listen to, you miss the neurotic men and hyperventilating women of Manhattan. 

Alfie (Hopkins) starts the ball rolling. He has a late life crisis, leaves his wife, phones for a hooker and then horrifies his family by marrying her.

A pandemic of raging libido is triggered. The circle of infidelity  widens and soon his elderly wife,  their daughter and  her husband all long for the stranger they might meet—tall, dark or otherwise. Ordinarily with Woody Allen, romantic  fantasy would meet complex cultural reality in the funniest way possible.  But not here, and when Roy (Brolin) turns his erotic vision of a woman in red (Pinto) into a relationship, there is complete silence on her South Asian background.

Allen hasn’t lost his gift for writing lines which sound as though the characters had thought of them just this moment. What he has lost is his curiosity about what exactly romantic chemistry is about and why it has such a short shelf life.

Woody Allen