Woody Allen’s recent film Match Point affords a great look at contemporary London and a truly operatic plot with love triangles, shocking violence and a main character seduced by his vaulting ambition. The film opens with an ancient and worbling recording of the legendary tenor Enrico Caruso. The Opera looms large in Match Point, suggesting to me that Allen intended to write a modern Opera. The score is not musical, but rather the visual richness of the worlds greatest city and the fantastical world of its ultra wealthy elite.

In a subtle and brief frame of foreshadowing, the main character, a recently retired professional tennis player who has seems to have had the talent to be great but not the killer instinct, lays in bed reading Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. This classic novel involves a somewhat hapless character who seems an unlikely murderer. The moral of the story is that while chance and happenstance may allow one to escape the law, one can never escape the ever more brutal punishment of a relentless conscience.

I highly recommend this intriguing film.

Link: http://www.matchpoint.dreamworks.com/main.html