Zelig is a shape-shifting non-entity. Able to assimilate and mimic the appearance and quirks of anyone and everyone from New York jazzmen to Freudian psychoanalysts, he is a mirror; the film a fable. As is usually the case with fables, there is one – very Allenesque – fault: he can’t do women. They are inscrutable to him, the Dark Continent. Fortunately, this blind spot allows Mia Farrow, playing another Allen archetype, the psychotherapist, to investigate the phenomenon when all others have given up hope.
Told as a documentary of real events, Zelig is a film about imitation that imitates. Like Manhattan, the film is shot in black and white, but the intent is for authenticity’s sake rather than romance. Comprised of a mix of authentic but out-of-context documentary footage, artificially-aged original film footage for Farrow and Allen’s scenes together, and ‘contemporary’ scenes filmed in colour which feature academic talking heads – Susan Sontag, Saul Bellow, Irving Howe – discussing the impact of the Zelig phenomenon on American culture, Zelig is narrated in a matter-of-fact voice that encourages us to examine rather than sympathise. The result poses questions. Just as Annie Hall’s digressive and fantastical nature challenges the idea of (Alvy’s) narrative objectivity, Zelig’s note-perfect imitation of the documentary form feeds doubt about its presumed veracity years before Photoshop, Wikipedia – and Forrest Gump.
After some slapstick, many wisecracks and the inevitable much-more-beautiful woman falling in love with Allen’s character, Zelig’s ability is explained as a product of social anxiety. He just wants to fit in, to be loved; what initially seems like a smart but one-note skit opens up and chimes with two of Allen’s big themes. The first being culture and identity: the Allen surrogate of his ‘serious’ films is bracketed by Diane Keaton’s smucky, Plath-reading, pot-smoking Annie Hall and Manhattan’s bullying, self-confident Mary, with her Academy of the Overrated – he blends in with both. And the second being the more familiar idea of art as a poisoned chalice that provides a religion of sorts for his existentially stranded characters (Stardust Memories, Hannah & Her Sisters) with the downside of a complete loss of self, or at least crushing disappointment and humiliation when reality comes crashing through (The Purple Rose of Cairo, Vicky Cristina Barcelona). Allen’s contradictions – that he’s the guy watching baseball in the backroom at a party where ‘people from the New Yorker!’ are present, and the guy mentally undressing a love interest with chatter about the artistic criteria of photography – are borne out in Zelig’s shifting anonymity.
That amorphous quality makes a lot of theories stick to Zelig; a less modest director would let that potential do its thing, but it’s a point the film, always mimicking, pre-empting, and poking fun at intellectuals, makes itself. Halfway through the scholarly narrator informs us that “leading French intellectuals . . . see in him a symbol for everything’. Everything might be a stretch, but you only have to look at Allen’s other preoccupations to view him as a symbol of the assimilated Jew, an overbearing mass culture, and his own studied impersonations of Ingmar Bergman.
Zelig’s magical element and its hobnobbing with Allen’s cultural heroes invites comparisons with Midnight to Paris, and, along with The Purple Rose of Cairo, it could comfortably claim to share a clear genealogy with Allen’s most recent offering. It’s just the kind of comparison that makes you realise how great he used to be.
