Sweet And Lowdown

Woody Allen may have made funnier films; he may have made more substantial ones. But I cannot recall a single movie of his extraordinarily fertile career that is infused with more purposeful charm than Sweet and Lowdown.

A subtle, supple faux biography of fictional American guitar player Emmett Ray, Allen's film is a love letter to Thirties jazz, a coded critique of pop culture historians, a warning about the intimidatory effects of hero-worship and a deceptively moving meditation on artistic responsibility.

In short, it's a gift from a veteran entertainer, a fully consummated liaison between his love of music and his love of movies.

Interspersed with face-to-camera interviews with jazz aficionados, writers and experts (including Allen himself), the film purports to dramatise the events surrounding Ray's brief career in which he wasted most of his talent, labouring in the shadow thrown across the Atlantic by his hero, the gipsy guitarist Django Reinhardt.

From the outset it is clear that Ray (Sean Penn) is a feckless, irresponsible genius - pimping girlfriends for money, getting drunk in poolhalls when he should be playing on stage, and generally frittering away his gifts.

And yet, when he sits down to play, his nimble fingers caress and cajole music from his guitar that is close to Reinhardt's alchemical playing - given that Reinhardt (some of whose music features on the soundtrack) developed his unique chording style as a result of fire-crippled fingers.

Ray's handicap is psychological; he suffers from a debilitating sense that he will never be as good as Reinhardt, which condemns him to be "the second greatest guitar player in the world".

Ray's constant references to "that gipsy guy in France" and the repeated stories of how he fainted on the two occasions he encountered his hero lead to a brace of the funniest moments in the film. While this is a comedy, it is not wall-to-wall laughs, and consequently Allen makes each joke count.

While cruising for women with his fellow band members, he encounters Hattie (Samantha Morton), a mute and simpleminded laundress, who attaches herself to him with the devotion of a lost puppy. Willingly seduced by him, she is further captivated by his rendition of I'm For Ever Blowing Bubbles, which he plays to her -significantly - after they have made love.

Against his better judgment - but wholly in keeping with his repressed nature - he forges a relationship with her and they coexist in a curiously affectionate "marriage" until Ray simply walks out, leaving her high and dry.

Later, Ray takes up with and marries a slinky society writer (Uma Thurman), who views Ray as more of a project than a lover before she is seduced away by the more dangerous attractions of a gangster's hit man (Anthony LaPaglia).

The conclusion of this relationship - explained through three wildly varying versions of a hold-up in a rural store - is hysterically funny.

Illusion (and, therefore, disillusion) is embedded in the fabric of the film. While the astutely-chosen locations evoke the railroad yards, city dumps, nightclubs and small back rooms of Swing Era New Jersey, Chicago and Detroit, the production never strayed farther than an hour's drive from Allen's beloved Manhattan.

The design and dressing (check out Penn's hairstyle) are such that one never questions the authenticity of time or place. Like Hitchcock, Allen leaves nothing to chance, no detail (aural or visual) unexamined.