PARALLEL LIVES

REVIEWED - MELINDA AND MELINDAThe opening scene devised by Woody Allen for Melinda and Melinda exudes the comforting familiarity of meeting up once a year with a lifelong friend, and even though most of the more recent encounters have not been among the happiest, this certainly proves to be the most satisfying in at least six years, since Sweet and Lowdown, coincidentally the last time Allen stayed behind the camera for one of his movies.

After the opening credits, framed as always in unadorned black and white, Allen plunges the viewer into one of those rarefied Manhattan environments that are a trademark of his movies: an upmarket restaurant where sophisticated New Yorkers are ruminating on the options of comedy and tragedy in art. This may well prompt a reminder of the furore that ensued all those years ago when Allen turned avowedly serious with Interiors, alienating the audience that only wanted his one-liners, and of the bitterness with which he addressed this plight in Stardust Memories.

Here, two of the diners are playwrights who forged their reputations by adhering to either comedy or tragedy as an outlet, and the movie's playful scenario invites each of them to approach the same premise through their chosen genres.

The dramatic trigger is that a distraught young woman named Melinda turns up uninvited at a Manhattan dinner party hosted by a less than happily married couple. In each case, the husband is a struggling actor. One (Jonny Lee Miller) is frustrated at being reduced to deodorant commercials while his practical, well-heeled wife (Chloë Sevigny) gets on with her life. The other (Will Ferrell) has failed to build on his early stage promise while his wife (Amanda Peet) is preparing to direct her feminist movie, The Castration Sonata.

These parallel narratives initially play like mirror images of each other, digressing into variations on the themes and towards alternative consequences before converging to make the well-signalled point that the distinction between comedy and tragedy is a thin line. One of the two playwrights puts it succinctly when he observes of a character: "He's despondent, he's desperate, he's suicidal. All the comic elements are in place."

Allen nimbly moves between the overlapping stories as he advances them with wit and wry cynicism, accompanying one with jazz and the other with classical music. Cast as the catalyst sending relationships reeling like skittles, Radha Mitchell subtly shifts between the two Melindas, giving her most impressive performance(s) since her breakthrough in High Art.

In Allen's unusually risk-taking casting, perhaps the most unlikely choices are Ferrell, whose limitations are exposed as he tries too hard to ape Allen, and Sevigny, who is splendidly assured and gets to deliver one of the best lines: "I haven't been to a dark bistro since college."