Woody Allen spins Magic in the Moonlight

Woody Allen has been fascinated by magic since he started performing tricks as a teenager and, since then, magic and magicians have often made appearances in his work: in his famous stand-up routine The Great Renaldo; in his O Henry Prize-winning short story The Kugelmass Episode; in his play The Floating Lightbulb, in the Oedipus Wrecks segment of New York Stories, and in Scoop, where he memorably played the magician, The Great Splendini, himself.

Spiritual mediums were all the rage during the 1920s, when Magic In The Moonlight is set. "At the time much was made of it," says Allen. "Very renowned people like Arthur Conan Doyle [creator of Sherlock Holmes] took it very seriously. There were all kinds of incidents, like spirit photographs, that people were wondering about. Séances were very common." The greatest magician of that era, Harry Houdini, attended many séances, debunking every clairvoyant he encountered. Interestingly, Houdini wasn't motivated by a desire to expose con artists, but by his sincere longing to discover that communicating with the dead was possible. Finding so much fraud was a disappointment to him, but, at the time of his death, he still held out hope for an afterlife.

Afterlife rejected

In Magic in the Moonlight, Colin Firth is delightful as Stanley, a world-famous magician who performs in disguise as the Chinese conjurer Wei Ling Soo, a man who rejects outright the possibility of any afterlife.

"He is an intelligent, scientific-minded, rational person, so what he sees as the stupidity of the gullible public and the fraudulently exploited grates on him," says Allen. Says Colin Firth, who plays Stanley: "He is supercilious, judgmental, cynical and arrogant, and has a very high opinion of his superior intellect. As a specialist in the art of illusion, he is a sceptic when it comes to anything that is spiritual, mystical, or occult. He prides himself on exposing the people who claim that there is actually something genuinely magical going on at things like séances." Firth continues: "I don't think I have ever played a protagonist in a film who gets so close to being completely unsympathetic. I'm sure the audience is rooting for him to get a pie in the face. The degree to which he is so completely dismissive of everybody else makes you long for him to be taken down a peg or two."

The cynic becomes sceptical when a fellow magician tells him about a young psychic, Sophie Baker (Emma Stone), who is living with a wealthy American family, the Catledges, residing in the south of France, and he sets out to expose any trickery on her behalf.

As Stanley is both world-famous and anonymous - nobody knows the true identity of the great Wei Ling Soo - he presents himself in the Catledge home as a businessman named Stanley Taplinger and soon discovers that Sophie is able to get mental pictures and impressions about people, their pasts, and their departed loved ones, that he finds impossible to explain.

It is Sophie who unmasks him

Despite how closely Stanley scrutinises her every move, Sophie continues to surprise and bewilder him. She tells him about events in his life she couldn't possibly know about. Instead of him discrediting her, it is Sophie who unmasks him as Wei Ling Soo. Undeterred by apparent proof to the contrary, Stanley remains convinced that she is unconditionally a fraud and that he will soon find her out.

"Stanley challenges her a lot, but Sophie knows she can consistently shock him." says Stone. "That gives her power. I also think she finds him really charming so she turns on a kind of schoolyard teasing with him." As in all his films, Allen employs very long takes during filming with a lot of dialogue, blocking and camera moves.

Says Firth: "On the face of it, it seems very simple, but it does mean that everything has to be right. Sometimes you do seven or eight takes and he'd be delighted, but you dropped your hat and you are going to have to do the whole thing again. He doesn't rehearse, so the first take is a kind of rehearsal and you have to repeat it until all the creases have been ironed out and everybody is up and running."

Suspending disbelief

Stone firmly believes that the allure of Magic in the Moonlight can be contributed to "how much we want to suspend our disbelief and be truly amazed by someone. We want stories, we want fairy tales - we want myths."

Says Firth: "I think it is about how you feel about mystery. It is how you feel about things that you can't categorise, that you can't solve scientifically or logically. And I think people have wildly diverging attitudes and relationships to those things. Some people chase the mystery and want to solve it scientifically and other people are just blindly hostile to anything that can't be solved or can't be understood. And there are some people who are happy to let mystery be a mystery."

Magic in the Moonlight explores the biggest mystery of all: falling in love, something that is as real as it is impossible to explain fully.

"It's a natural human condition to want things to be a little more magical," says Stone. "And the magic in the movie is love. And love just happens. It might not make sense logically, but that's what's so beautiful about it and that's what's so magical about it."

Says Allen: "Seeing someone and being instantly attracted to them is an inexplicable thing. You can try to give reasons for it: I like the person's style, I like their sense of humour, I like their ideas, I like the way they look - but, in the end, you never really know what it is because someone with the same style and sense of humour or whatever, you are not attracted to. It is so complex because there is something intangible there. I'm sure a million years from now with computers they will be able to mathematically graph what is going on, but for now and for the foreseeable future there is no proof it will ever change. There is a certain magical excitement to meeting somebody and having positive romantic feelings for them."

If you are looking for a romantic comedy loaded with mystery, laughs and tranquil escapism, Magic in the Moonlight offers a great trip to the movies.

Read more about Magic in the Moonlight and other new films opening this week at www.writingstudio.co.za.