"Real people want to live imaginary lives, and fictional people want to live real lives."
The film is set during the Great Depression, and Cecilia is an incompetent restaurant waiter who has to support her grumpy, unmotivated, and unattractive husband Munch on a meager salary. The people in the play are full of fun, singing and dancing, and living extravagantly every day. Reality and fantasy are like the night sky of AQI index 360 and Van Gogh's "Starry Night".
Tom in the play is innocent, brave, and romantic to perfection, and Jill, who plays him, is eager to be noticed, recognized, eager to succeed and has the potential. Cecilia is drawn to Jill's Tom, and for the first time she truly feels loved, even knowing that Tom is fictional. Jill was moved by Cecilia's understanding and fell in love with her who admired her, and perhaps, she really fell in love with Cecilia who had unique ideas. It was difficult for Cecilia to refuse this seemingly congenial love, so she left Munch without hesitation, and said goodbye to Tom with some reluctance.
When Woody Allen was writing the script, the first thing he had in mind was that Tom would walk off the screen and spend his life with Cecilia. When Cecilia took Tom to the church to see Jesus, Tom began to think about the real life, the meaning of existence, the source and destination of all things. His freedom was no longer just freedom without having to pay the price of anxiety. At that time, He then moved further and further away from his role, although this was not shown in the film. Tom belongs to the screen, not reality. A line in "Husband, Wife and Lover" is: "Life does not imitate art, life imitates vulgar TV". But Cecilia will not give up reality, she has always understood that the fictional world is only a partial idealization of reality, and reality is complete. Reality can't be perfect, and it doesn't have to be.
In "Annie Hall", Woody Allen said through Alvey's words: "Life can be divided into 'terrible' and 'sad'." In an interview with Stigl, he also admitted frankly, Be glad that your life is just sad, lower your expectations, and you will not always be disappointed. What's interesting is that the pessimistic Allen likes to create characters who have a different outlook on life than him. At the end of the movie, Cecilia, who was pigeon-off by Jill, sat in the movie theater, and her eyes flashed with yearning for the life in the movie again. Such a selective irrationality is extremely cute!
After the movie was broadcast, the last "MGM" lion roared again, and the player automatically exited the full screen. It seemed that Cecilia would not come out of the screen.
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