Woody Allen Returns With Darker Look at Life and Love

25 September 2010

Woody Allen and Anthony Hopkins on the set of the movie "You Will Meet A Tall, Dark Stranger"

Helena, played by Gemma Jones, seeks out a psychic fortuneteller to help her understand why Anthony Hopkins as Alfie, her husband of more than 40 years, has left her to take up with a much younger, woman named Charmaine.

Sally is married to Roy, who wrote a hit novel, but has been unable to repeat the success. Their relationship grows tenser by the week and meeting sexy Charmaine doesn't help.

Perhaps Roy is living a bit vicariously through Alfie's romance; struggling to write, he finds himself staring out the window at the pretty young woman in the flat across the way.

As their stories intersect in the London neighborhood where he set the film, writer-director Woody Allen says the characters confront issues he has explored before in more serious films like 1978's "Interiors."

"This film is an attempt to deal with the same subject, but to deal with it in a more comic way. The subject matter is still the inability of people to relate to one another, people needing some kind of certainty in life, people deluding themselves into some sense that there is some purpose to life or that there is some extra meaning to life when, in fact, it's a meaningless experience …and yet in the end even faith in anything at all is better than no faith at all," he said.