"The Purple Rose of Cairo"
A woman's dream lover walked off the screen, the two fell in love, and then the real actor himself appeared, so she had to choose between fiction and reality. It is obviously impossible to choose fiction, it is crazy, so you can only choose reality, but reality will hurt you. --Woody Allen
"The Purple Rose of Cairo" was Woody's most satisfying work before 2002. But "The Purple Rose of Cairo" and "A Midsummer Night Comedy" are Woody's most unsuccessful commercial films. From a market perspective, I think "Midsummer Night's Sexual Comedy" is too boring, and the sad ending of "The Purple Rose of Cairo" did not meet the audience's expectations for the ending "Great Perfection". After all, not many viewers are willing to go to the cinema to watch movies that make them sad and disappointed. But this is what Woody thinks is the best ending, the most perfect ending, because it expresses Woody's pessimistic worldview. "This ending is what I made for this movie." "This is the happy ending." -Woody Allen
"The Purple Rose of Cairo" is a Woody-style movie through and through. At this point, Orson Wells's vicious tongue hit the nail on the head. He once said: "Everything Woody Allen does on the screen is actually to cure his own disease." Woody's movie characters have his shadow, and he turns into various forms in the movie. Various roles are used to express his pain in real life, his contradictions in thought, his manic mood for the unbearable lightness of life, and his pessimism and nihilism. The female protagonist Cecilia in "The Purple Rose of Cairo" works in a restaurant. She has trouble with her hands and feet. She is complained by customers all the time and scolded by the boss. Her husband often beats her and cheats unscrupulously. The only way for Cecilia to escape this terrible real life is to go to the cinema to watch a movie. There is no doubt Woody's shadow on Cecilia. When Woody was a child, his father and mother quarreled, so Woody went to the cinema to watch a movie and escaped the bad real life. "I always escape reality through movies, and leave my dilapidated home and all the troubles from school and family behind." In the words of Woody, "One of the pleasures of cinema is the cruelty that makes you escape reality." Woody I have been obsessed with movie theaters since I was a child, and linger about it.
In "The Purple Rose of Cairo", a movie shown in the cinema, Woody called it a "champagne comedy." The protagonist of the comedy in the 1930s and 1940s always wore a dress to go to high-end nightclubs, always lived in the penthouse, always in Drink champagne. Woody loves these movies very much. "I got into the movie theater, where I could see luxurious private rooms, white telephones, and those charming women and funny men. They always have a happy ending, and the heroes are always so great. I think that's good for me. It had a decisive impact and left an indelible mark on my memory." Woody even arranged Cecilia in the film and entered the world of champagne movies. She finally moved into the penthouse, where there was even the white telephone that she had always dreamed of. You may even find that all of Woody's characters have his own shadow, and he rarely divorces his life experience to shape a movie's protagonist.
"If there is any theme in my movie, it must be the gap between reality and fantasy." —Woody Allen
The theme of "The Purple Rose of Cairo" is so simple. Cecilia's real life is miserable, she had to dream about the good life in the movie in the movie theater. But one day a miracle happened. The characters in the movie came out. The perfect boyfriend in the fantasy made Cecilia at a loss. She also made up her mind to live a good life with him in the movie, but she was a real man. When the actor fell in love with her, she finally abandoned her fantasy perfection and chose reality, and reality finally abandoned her. This just proves Woody's point of view: reality is cruel and pessimistic. Although the reality is so cruel, Cecilia still chooses to find hope in reality, but can't accept the perfection of fantasy. It can be seen that Woody is full of disappointment with the inferiority of people themselves. Even if happiness is within reach, the protagonists in his movies will always miss it in a hurry for various reasons. Virgil who can’t live with Louise in "Fools in Prison", Boris who was taken away by death in "Love and Death", Ivey who missed Annie in "Anne Hall", "My Heart is Deep The desperate mother in "The Place" and the wobbly Isaac Davis in "Manhattan." . . . . . Most of the characters in his director's works don't trust anyone, even themselves, which Woody often shows to the audience.
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