Stardust Memories (1980)

There's not much of a plot. Most of the film takes place over one weekend where filmmaker Sandy Bates (Allen) is attending a retrospective of his work at the Stardust hotel. He interacts with the general public, critics, studio heads, and other luminaries, all of whom agree that they liked his earlier, funny, movies better than his more recent serious ones. At the same time Sandy is struggling with women problems. He's plagued by memories of Dorrie (Rampling), a former unstable lover, while flirting with a young woman he meets over the weekend, and also contemplating committing to a serious relationship with yet another woman. During all of this, Sandy ponders life, love, and art, while wondering if there is meaning to any of them.

Stardust Memories (1980)

Allen's filmic oeuvre is often cited as the paradigmatic example of comic postmodernism, and Allen's work as an intertextual or metareferential filmmaker has attracted the attention of numerous commentators. From his first film, What's Up, Tiger Lily? (1967), a re-edited and redubbed version of a Japanese James Bond-type thriller, through more fully realized parodies such as Take the Money and Run (1969), Stardust Memories (1980), Zelig (1983), and The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), Allen has made consistent use of parodic elements in his films. Yet at the same time we can read Allen as a highly effective social satirist, a filmmaker determined to expose the hypocrisies and excesses of contemporary American life and to analyze the foibles of various cultural milieus. 041b061a72