Before watching a Woody Allen movie, you would have already been primed up for the following from him- The film will center on middle and upper class people who are unhappily married. If Allen stars in it, he is going to be a misunderstood intellectual who is always apprehensive of his wife having feelings for someone else. There will be moments when you open up with both your hands to laugh at a funny sequence and instantly check your response and stifle it, perceiving the underpinning of sadness over which the humor has been so delicately assembled upon. There will be veritable references to literature and delicious historical vignettes here and there and an inevitable --blink-and-miss dig at the Nazis. But there is something else , which Allen specializes in , for which his hardcore fans canonize him ---- he is an desperate, yet an untiring excavator, who remains unhappy till he finds some meaning to all our mundane lives and existence ,which he believes is interred miles beneath layers of science , materialism and modernity.
But , case in point, Manhattan Murder Mystery, is, thankfully for some, a refreshing light weight movie where Allen has tried hard to extricate himself from his philosophical alter-ego , thereby taking a sabbatical from his regular job and deciding to pursue something else that is completely uncharacteristic of him—pulling out a magnifying glass and follow fingerprints. He has become a sleuth. He has divorced Bergman and invited the ‘Rear Window’-ian Hitchcock to dine with his Chaplin.
The result is ,not surprisingly, delightful. Allen plays Lipton, an old publisher, married for quite a long time with a bored home-ridden Diane Keaton. The old couple meet their new neighbours- an another old couple who are in an enviably long blissful conjugation. The next day , the wife of their neighbor dies and the ensuing events suggest that the death could have been unnatural. Keaton is excited at the prospect of solving a possible murder mystery and brings her friend Alan Alda to help her with the new job. Lipton embodies the typical middle class city dweller indifferent to his abnormal neighbourhood, who descends into a perpetual paranoia of losing his wife to Alda, in the course of her new found obsession of sleuthing. Lipton turns ‘Aadhavan’ Vadivelu throughout the movie unable to stand his wife’s near neurotic prying in her neighbor’s affair.
In one stretch that happens at the neighbour’s flat, Keaton leaves her husband and the neighbor in the hall and goes to prepare coffee in the kitchen. The neighbor offers Lipton to display his achievements in stamp-collecting to which he is unable to immediately express his disinterest. Keaton,meanwhile discovers something fishy in the kitchen and soon she retreats to the hall with the coffee and starts a conversation with the neighbor, taking a seat on the couch along with her husband. The camera zooms on towards the couple as the dialogue progresses. You cannot choose whether to listen to the conversation or burst into laughing at the disgruntled Lipton, seemingly lost in a state of insuperable torpor after listening to mind numbing lectures on stamps by his neighbor. Allen is a riot here.
The best scene , indubitably, is the lift sequence where the couple is locked up inside for sometime, discovering to their horror , a dead body hanging over their heads. Here is where Allen’s prowess as a writer-comedian comes to the fore. In a sequence in Pandiya Naadu, Vishal would invite Soori to talk things over a ‘cutting’. The scene cuts to a saloon where Soori discovers the other ‘cutting’. The scene would have retained its humour had that ‘joke’ not been oversold. But, Soori would proceed on to say ‘Naan cutting na udane andha cutting nu nenachan.Indha cutting na vanthurkave maatan’.[Had I known that ‘cutting’ refers to literal cutting (of hair) I would not have come]. Here , Allen does the same thing but the result is doubly terrific , ‘Claustrophobia and a dead body, it’s a neurotic’s jackpot’. Don’t do that, unless you are Allen.
Allen employs the technique of moving the camera clandestinely behind his characters , many a time giving the impression of us following them secretly. The film is rich in tributes to the noir genre and the climax where the villain hostages the wife of the protagonist, is one.Manhattan Murder Mystery (1992) is one of Allen’s lesser known works, possibly an underrated one.
“The best you can do to get through life is distraction. Love works as a distraction. And work works as a distraction….But the key is to distract yourself” This was Allen , when he spoke about life and the pessimism that shrouds it. MMM , was essentially a comedy thriller and his favourite theme of adultery ,remains very much at the surface. MMM is lesser known, possibly because Allen wanted to take a break from brooding over life, atleast once. He was content ,for a change, just to entertain and get distracted.
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