To Rome with Love (2012)

Woody Allen's Roman postcard arrives with four vignettes and an ensemble assembled from whichever passports were nearest to hand. An Italian mortician sings in the shower. A newlywed loses his wife to a film star and gains a prostitute in her place. A clerk wakes to find himself famous for no reason at all. An architect wanders his old neighborhood and dispenses commentary to a younger version of himself. The film is breezy, episodic, and content to be a travel brochure with better dialogue.

On the matter of social consciousness, the picture is a relic of an earlier disposition. The women here exist to be desired, mistaken for one another, or abandoned at the hotel. Penelope Cruz plays a prostitute deployed as a punchline about marital misunderstanding. The Italian setting supplies an international cast, but the casting follows the geography instead of making any statement about it. Race, climate, neurodivergence, and history go entirely unmentioned, which for a farce about fame is arguably appropriate. The satire of celebrity in the Leopoldo story glances at media culture but never reaches for the wallet of the wealthy.

The dialogue is talky in the familiar manner, though it aims for laughs and not for sermons. Allen has no message to deliver here, and he delivers it efficiently. It is a lightweight confection, competently made, faintly embarrassing in its attitudes, and utterly unconcerned with the moral questions of its moment. Critics were divided, and audiences paid for it anyway. The whole affair resembles a postcard: pretty, dated, and signed by someone we would rather not discuss.