If James Bond films were once fantasy travel telly for people who could not afford holidays in exotic locations, Woody Allen's recent movies increasingly resemble big-screen travel brochures for the well-off. After Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Midnight in Paris and several films set in London, the film-maker presents another set of privileged, navel-gazing American dysfunctionals hammering out their neuroses against a gorgeous European backdrop in To Rome with Love, the first trailer for which has just hit the web.
The film was previously titled Nero Fiddled and The Bop Decameron before settling on its current moniker, which recalls multi-director, single city romance flicks such as New York, I Love You, or Paris Je t'aime. Allen has also plumped for the vignette approach, but decided to direct all four segments himself. In the first, he plays a husband who travels with his wife (Judy Davis) to meet the family of an Italian man their daughter is set to marry. It's Allen's first on-screen appearance in six years and he's reassuringly quick with the one-liners: "the kid's a communist, the father's a mortician … does the mother run a leper colony?" might easily have slipped from the sassy yet curmudgeonly lips of Annie Hall's Alvy Singer.
Elsewhere the screwball comedy tropes come thick and fast. Call girl Penélope Cruz finds herself in the hotel room of a client who does not seem to understand what she's doing there, while Roberto Benigni appears to have been mistaken for a famous film star by the Roman crowds. In the final vignette, Jesse Eisenberg and girlfriend Greta Gerwig invite the latter's friend, a cast-against-type Ellen Page, into their home after she suffers a break-up. We can probably guess that Eisenberg, as the Allen cypher, is going to find himself bowled over by the unorthodox arrival's feisty antics. This wouldn't be a Woody Allen movie without at least one character spending most of the film desperately trying to justify their own impending infidelity.
The Oscar-winning Midnight in Paris was Allen's best-received film in years and also pulled in a staggering $148m at the global box office. Can you see To Rome with Love repeating that success, or does his latest European sojourn look a little too safe to have audiences checking the price of flights to Italy?
