MATCH POINT - Woody Allen's new balls?

This evening I saw an advance screening of Woody Allen's newie MATCH POINT, not released here til January. The film, his first film shot entirely outside New York, stars Scarlett Johansson and an otherwise British cast including Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, Emily Mortimer, Brian Cox and Penelope Wilton.

His new backdrop has invigorated him to a certain extent but the film lost my goodwill when the plot was pitched suddenly into melodrama. The first 45 minutes promised much - Rhys-Meyers is Chris, a tennis player just off the circuit who finds work coaching in a well-heeled tennis club. A friendship develops with upper-class Tom (Matthew Goode) who invites Chris to the opera with his family. There he meets Tom's sister Chloe (Mortimer) who is won-over by his charm which develops at a visit to the family country estate. At the same weekend party, Chris flirts with a sexy girl - who turns out to be Tom's girlfriend Nola (Johansson), an American actress not having the best of success in London. 

Despite his relationship with Chloe he finds himself attracted to Nola who fends him off until, upset with her future mother-in-law's snide remarks, she has sex with him one rain-swept afternoon in the country. Chris is told a few weeks later by Tom that he has dumped Nola as he has found a more acceptable girl for his family and Nola vanishes from London. Chris marries Chloe and accepts a job in her father's business in the city. Then Nola reappears in London and Tom's passion is re-ignited...

The film turns into a love triangle with Chris torn between his wife's desperate attempts to get pregnant and his mistress' increasing desperation at his unwillingness to end his marriage. When Nola gives him the unthinkable - but predictable - news that she is pregnant Chris is forced to choose his fate. The film then lurches abruptly into a cross between Theodore Dreiser's AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY and Dostoyevsky's CRIME AND PUNISHMENT - via Allen's own CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS.

Needless to say, the film's plotline is played out in front of London's most glamorous locations - the characters only appear to shop in Bond Street (which might explain why they are never seen buying food), Rhys-Meyers' office is in 'The Gerkhin', the apartment Rhys-Meyers and Mortimer move into after their marriage is a huge penthouse affair with enormous windows overlooking the Thames and the cultural life of the couples is viewed at Covent Garden, Tate Modern, The Curzon Mayfair and The Palace Theatre. Indeed there are so many shots of Rhys-Meyers coming out of designer shops that I thought "Why not have him come out of Buckingham Palace and have done with it?"  
 
The absurd melodramatic turn of events also rendered the film's most interesting character, Scarlett Johansson's Nola, into little more than a pathetic shrill creature. Up until then, Johansson had fleshed out the character wonderfully, making her attraction to Rhys-Meyers totally understandable. The casting of Rhys-Meyers is problematic - his inscrutable air keeps his Chris at an emotional distance from the audience and more strangely his Dublin accent is almost untraceable but much is made of his character's Irishness.