To Rome With Love (2012)
Film Overview
Four overlapping stories unfold across Rome, where tourists, residents, newlyweds, architects, singers and one completely ordinary office worker discover that the Eternal City has a habit of making ordinary life considerably less predictable.
Woody Allen returns to acting as Jerry, a retired American opera director who travels to Rome with his wife Phyllis after their daughter Hayley becomes engaged to Italian lawyer Michelangelo.
Jerry discovers that Michelangelo’s undertaker father Giancarlo has a remarkable singing voice — but only while taking a shower. Convinced that he has discovered an extraordinary operatic talent, Jerry becomes determined to put him on stage without eliminating the unusual conditions under which he performs best.
Elsewhere, Alec Baldwin plays John, a successful architect revisiting the Roman neighbourhood where he lived as a young man. He encounters architecture student Jack, played by Jesse Eisenberg, and begins observing — and possibly remembering — Jack’s increasingly dangerous fascination with his girlfriend’s visiting friend Monica, played by Elliot Page.
Roberto Benigni plays Leopoldo Pisanello, an anonymous clerk who wakes one morning to discover that the media has inexplicably decided he is famous. Reporters begin demanding his opinions on breakfast, shaving and every other meaningless detail of daily life.
A fourth story follows newlyweds Antonio and Milly after they become separated on their first day in Rome. Penélope Cruz plays Anna, a prostitute who is mistaken for Antonio’s wife, while Milly finds herself drawn into an encounter with celebrated actor Luca Salta.
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My Review
Four Roman stories and absolutely no interest in behaving sensibly
To Rome with Love is less interested in telling one great Roman story than in enjoying the possibility that almost anything might happen once its characters arrive in the city.
The four strands do not need to meet. There is no final clever mechanism tying Jerry to Leopoldo or Jack to Antonio. Rome is the connection, and the film treats the city almost like a collection of short stories being opened one after another.
That looseness is part of its appeal. Allen had just made the tightly organised Midnight in Paris; here he allows himself something more episodic, closer to a comic anthology in which realism is negotiable from the beginning.
One story contains an opera singer who can only perform successfully in the shower. Another contains a completely ordinary man who becomes famous for no reason whatsoever. Nobody pauses to insist the rules should be stricter.
Rome is not simply where these stories happen. It is the permission slip that allows them to become slightly impossible.
Woody Allen’s return to the screen is one of the film’s great pleasures. Jerry is a retired opera director who insists retirement does not mean he has stopped having ideas. Unfortunately for everybody around him, discovering Giancarlo gives him a particularly large one.
Fabio Armiliato is a genuine operatic tenor, which is essential to the joke. Giancarlo’s singing really is magnificent. The ridiculous part is the circumstance under which Jerry can extract it from him.
The eventual staging of Pagliacci with Giancarlo performing inside a working shower is the film at its most cheerfully absurd. Jerry has discovered that artistic greatness requires a shower, so rather than questioning the premise he redesigns the theatre around it.
Judy Davis is exactly the right person to stand beside him as Phyllis, responding to Jerry’s professional excitement with the weary familiarity of someone who has already survived a lifetime of his ideas.
Jerry’s great artistic breakthrough is discovering that the problem with opera was apparently the absence of indoor plumbing.
The Alec Baldwin and Jesse Eisenberg story operates much more strangely. John wanders into his old neighbourhood and begins advising Jack even though his physical relationship to the younger characters becomes increasingly uncertain.
He sometimes appears to be standing inside Jack’s life as an older commentator who can see every mistake before it happens. The characters occasionally acknowledge him and occasionally seem almost to move through his observations.
I like that Allen never over-explains it. John may be remembering himself, imagining another young man repeating familiar mistakes, or simply functioning as a dramatic conscience.
What matters is that he knows exactly what Monica represents before Jack does.
Elliot Page’s Monica is deliberately exhausting and seductive at the same time. She has an opinion, reference or emotional complication ready for almost every subject.
Jack initially treats her as irritating because admitting attraction would be more dangerous. John sees the progression immediately because age has given him the advantage of knowing what comes next.
Greta Gerwig’s Sally is therefore caught in a story whose outcome seems obvious to almost everyone except the people actually making the decisions.
That gives the strand a slightly melancholy quality beneath the jokes. Experience can recognise mistakes without necessarily preventing anybody younger from repeating them.
John has already lived long enough to recognise Jack’s mistake. The irritating part is discovering that recognition and prevention are not the same skill.
Roberto Benigni’s Leopoldo story may be the broadest satire, but it has aged rather well. He becomes famous without achievement, scandal or even a particularly interesting personality.
Television crews ask what he ate for breakfast. Reporters follow him to work. Women suddenly find him attractive because everybody else has agreed he is somebody worth looking at.
Leopoldo initially hates the invasion and then discovers something more complicated when the attention disappears. Being absurdly famous is exhausting. Returning to invisibility is unexpectedly painful.
The film understands that attention can become addictive even when the person receiving it knows perfectly well there was never any reason for it to begin.
The newlywed story gives Penélope Cruz the most purely comic role. Anna walks into Antonio’s life through a misunderstanding and immediately adapts to the situation with much greater confidence than he does.
Alessandro Tiberi plays Antonio as a man terrified that every important person he meets will discover something embarrassing. Anna understands social performance instinctively and turns the deception into entertainment.
Meanwhile Milly wanders through Rome and encounters Luca Salta, allowing both newlyweds to acquire experiences they probably did not imagine during the train journey into the city.
By the time they reunite, the marriage has already been complicated and perhaps strengthened by things neither intends to describe accurately.
Antonio and Milly arrive in Rome as innocent newlyweds and leave their first day with considerably more information than either plans to put in the wedding album.
The soundtrack is inseparable from the city. Domenico Modugno’s Nel blu dipinto di blu gives the opening an immediate Italian identity, while Arrivederci Roma almost announces the film’s intentions by title alone.
Then opera takes over. Puccini, Verdi, Giordano and Leoncavallo become part of Jerry’s story, with Fabio Armiliato’s real voice allowing the shower gag to remain musically impressive even when the staging is ridiculous.
That is important. Allen never treats the opera itself as the joke. The joke is Jerry’s determination to preserve extraordinary singing by whatever absurd means are necessary.
The music therefore gives the film both genuine beauty and one of its largest comic set pieces.
Rome is photographed as somewhere characters can turn a corner and suddenly find themselves inside another possibility. Piazza Venezia, the Trevi Fountain, Trastevere, Piazza Mattei and the Roman Forum are recognisable without the film becoming a simple postcard.
Villa d’Este expands the geography beyond the centre of Rome, while the narrow streets surrounding the younger characters create a more intimate city than the monumental locations alone would provide.
Like Paris in the previous film, Rome is unmistakably filtered through affection. But the tone is different. Paris was organised around nostalgia. Rome is organised around appetite.
Everybody wants something — artistic success, romance, fame, excitement, experience — and the city keeps providing slightly more than they expected.
Midnight in Paris was about wanting another time. To Rome with Love is about wanting almost everything at once.
I do not think all four stories are equally strong, but the unevenness bothers me less here than it would in a more tightly plotted film. The structure allows one strand to disappear while another takes over.
The strongest material for me is Jerry and Giancarlo, partly because Allen and Davis have such effortless timing and partly because the shower-opera idea is so gloriously committed to its own absurdity.
But Benigni’s fame satire, Baldwin’s strange observer and Cruz’s confident comic performance all belong naturally to the same film.
To Rome with Love does not attempt to explain Rome. It spends two hours inventing reasons to stay there a little longer.
Cast and Characters
Woody Allen
A retired American opera director whose discovery of an extraordinary bathroom singer immediately revives his professional ambitions.
Alec Baldwin
A successful architect revisiting the Rome of his youth who becomes an enigmatic commentator on Jack’s romantic decisions.
Roberto Benigni
A completely ordinary office worker who inexplicably becomes one of Rome’s most closely followed celebrities.
Penélope Cruz
A Roman prostitute who is mistaken for Antonio’s new wife and proves far more comfortable with the deception than he is.
Jesse Eisenberg
An architecture student whose fascination with Monica develops despite every warning that the situation is heading somewhere obvious.
Fabio Armiliato
Michelangelo’s undertaker father, blessed with a magnificent operatic voice that happens to work properly only in the shower.
Italian popular music and grand opera turn Rome into a performance
Domenico Modugno, Puccini, Verdi, Giordano and Leoncavallo give the film a musical identity that ranges from immediately recognisable Italian popular song to full-scale opera.
Nel blu dipinto di blu
Better known internationally as Volare, Modugno’s recording gives the film its first musical image of Rome: exuberant, romantic and unmistakably Italian.
Fabio Armiliato gives the comedy a genuinely magnificent voice
Armiliato performs music from Puccini, Giordano and Leoncavallo, allowing Giancarlo’s unlikely career to remain musically credible even when Jerry’s staging becomes increasingly absurd.
Verdi’s La traviata and popular Italian songs broaden a soundtrack that feels completely tied to its Roman setting.
E lucevan le stelle
Armiliato performs Cavaradossi’s famous aria from Tosca, giving Jerry’s discovery of Giancarlo real musical weight.
Nessun dorma
The great tenor aria from Turandot becomes another demonstration that Giancarlo’s talent is considerably more impressive than the circumstances.
Arrivederci Roma
Alfredo Messina performs one of the songs most closely associated with the city itself.
Vesti la giubba
The Pagliacci sequence transforms one of opera’s great dramatic moments into the film’s most elaborate shower-based theatrical experiment.
Locations
Rome is the film’s common character, connecting four otherwise independent stories through piazzas, neighbourhood streets, fountains, ruins and villas.
Piazza Venezia
The film opens amid the traffic of Piazza Venezia, immediately establishing Rome as both subject and setting.
Trevi Fountain
One of the city’s most familiar landmarks appears within Allen’s affectionate tour through central Rome.
Trastevere
The narrow streets and neighbourhood atmosphere provide a more intimate Roman setting for several of the younger characters.
Piazza Mattei
The historic square is used during the newlywed story and Milly’s unexpected encounter with the world of cinema.
Villa d’Este
The celebrated gardens and fountains take the film beyond central Rome into one of Lazio’s most spectacular historic settings.
Roman Forum
The ruins place Allen’s contemporary romantic confusion against a city whose past remains visible almost everywhere.
Awards and Recognition
Allen Returns to Acting
The film marked Woody Allen’s first acting appearance in one of his own features since Scoop in 2006.
Rome After Paris
Following Midnight in Paris, Allen continued the European phase of his career with another film built explicitly around a great capital city.
Fabio Armiliato
Casting an internationally established tenor allowed the Giancarlo storyline to combine broad comedy with genuine operatic performance.
Four Independent Stories
Rather than forcing its characters together, the screenplay allows four separate comic narratives to coexist within the same city.
Shot Throughout Rome
The production used an unusually large number of recognisable locations across Rome and Lazio.
A Roman Anthology
The film remains one of Allen’s loosest ensemble works: less a single narrative than four comic variations on what might happen to people in Rome.