How Woody Allen does it

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WANT to watch a very funny hour-and-three-quarters-long Jewish joke? Then go and see Woody Allen's latest film, "Zelig"

It is a bit like "Portnoy's Complaint" without the sex. What's left? you might ask. Answer: the dilemma of the assimilated Jew, fearful of being recognised, eager to ape those who will despise him for being Jewish and despise him even more for trying not to be.

In Philip Roth's book, Alex Portnoy's search for Thereal McCoy - the ultimate desirable female - means giving up his identity (I wish you well to wear it!) and his character (who needs it?). "But who wants character?" is Alex's rhetorical question to his analyst. "I want Thereal McCoy! In her blue parka and her red earmuffs and her big white mittens - Miss - Zelig (played by Woody Alien) actually meets ana mates with his Miss McCoy (one Eudora Fletcher). But if Portnoy zeng denes his whole self to please anybody whose company he happens to be in. And while Portnoy struggles at self-denial (not to mention self-abuse) but is constantly betrayed by his physical form, Leonard Zelig's adaptation to his surroundings is totally automatic and extends to changes of physical form. When he talks to Irishmen his hair turns red and his nose turns up!

Hiding out in Chinatown Zelig looks Chinese, in Nurenburg he falls in with the Nazis, in the company of psychiatrists the patient claims that he too is a psychiatrist. "I worked many years with Freud in Vienna, but we broke up after a disagreement over penis envy. He wanted to limit it to females ..

Chameleon

Faced with fat men, Zelig puts on weight in minutes, questioned by French doctors he instantly acquires a foreign language, sitting in a cockpit for the first time he flies a plane ...

The American public fall for the freak as the media milk the chacoeleon f the "human for all it's not worth.

Millions flock to see him turn into an aged Red Indian and back again, into a youthful black man in black company and sprout a beard and side-locks while standing between two rabbis. Dancers are encouraged to "Do the chameleon' and "Leonard the Lizzard" becomes a hit song.

Meanwhile Zelig (the German for "soulful'") is an object of psychiatric investigation. The shrinks are a gaggle of idiots, except one, Dr. Eudora Fletcher (played by Mia Farrow looking more like singer Joni Mitchell). Hundreds of outrageous improbabilities later,. the gentle nebbich has won Dr. Fletcher's mutable heart and is finally also re-instated in the hearts of the American public.

If all this is hard to imagine, remember that the film is in the same form as documentaries like 'Rosie the Riveter" or "The Wobblies": black and white archival footage (most of it fake of course) is punctuated now and ANDREW HORNUNG reviews Allen's latest movie "Zelig', and attempts to draw out the elements which make up "a comic Kafka hero that is both durable and universal"

again by short contemporary interviews in colour with people who had some direct contact with the past events. Thus Bruno Bettelheim, Irving Howe and others add their intellectual comments and memories to help interpret the life of Leonard Zelig as an allegory of the Jewish condition and so on.

Of course this allegory is there. At the same time, the anxieties identified as a or even the Jewish condition stand for much more general and global insecurities. And they. also relate to a more restricted group, actors, whose very success lies in their dispensing with their selves - even physic-. ally! — and allowing themselves to become public property.

The achievement of the film lies in its ability to explore a number of such themes with unflagging wit, throwing in sight-gags and one liners, surrealism and satire.

Like the best Jewish jokes, it mixes these elements to make a poignant and universal human comment.

How does Woody Allen do it?

He works hard at his material, but even before the evidence of these comic labours there is the man himself. He is the Jewish boy-next-door: bespectacled, nervous, lousy at sports, looks like a zero and behaves like a minus.

He follows a long line of loveable screen jerks - Buster Keaton, Stan Laurel, Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, Jerry Lewis - but has transformed their central feature, innocence, into something else: self-conscious urban angst - insecurities about identity, sex and survival.

His pre-Freudian forerunners grappled with the world outside themselves: Everyman versus everything else (apart from true love, of course). There is a good deal of this kind of humour in Woody Allen films, but his real enemies are his own sense of guilt, his fears and phobias.

One of his problems is America. England only expects every man to do his duty. America expects every underprivileged schlemiel to become President. In reality only very privileged schlemiels ever make it, but the dream is more powerful than the truth. The American dream - an amalgam of all the film-set cliches going, truelove, rags-to-riches, manhood as Buntline Special bringing law to the frontier - drives the dreamers to the point of breakup.

After all, any failure must be your own fault. If you want an Manchester factory workers, 1938: Allen's picture is true to reality