Movies You Might Have Missed: Woody Allen's Everybody Says I Love You

Long before ‘La La Land’, Woody Allen’s enjoyable musical film ‘Everyone Says I Love You’, released 20 years ago, had an all-singing cast including Julia Roberts, Goldie Hawn, Drew Barrymore and Edward Norton

Woody Allen, Goldie Hawn and Alan Alda star in ‘Everyone Says I Love You’

Damien Chazelle’s La La Land is officially a critical and commercial smash hit, having been nominated for a record-equalling 14 Oscars and winning a record-breaking seven Golden Globes. Many critics have pointed out that the nostalgic movie musical seemed to be all but obsolete in the era of the blockbuster; yet, somewhat surprisingly, in 1997 Woody Allen attempted a musical of his own and the result was one of the finer films of his later period.

Allen’s career is broadly split into three distinct phases; “the early, funny ones” from the start of his career to Love and Death in 1975, the golden age (from Annie Hall in 1977 to Radio Days in 1987) and the later period. While fans might quibble about the exact point at which the golden age came to an end, the auteur’s work since the mid-1990s has undeniably been variable.

Everyone Says I Love You, released almost exactly 20 years ago, came during a winning run of lighter films for the director after a period of dark, brooding dramas. The central conceit might feel familiar for those who felt Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling were not cast primarily for their musical abilities; Allen wanted his actors to have realistic singing voices so that the audience found the characters plausible as ordinary people breaking into song. The two exceptions were Goldie Hawn and Drew Barrymore, the former asked to sing intentionally worse to aid the realism and the latter’s songs dubbed after convincing the filmmaker she was tone deaf.

This is typical Allen fare as the characters journey between Manhattan, Venice and Paris while falling in and out of love. Rather than bespoke music, the film takes classic songs and fits them into an updated scenario in a manner reminiscent of Singin’ in the Rain, perhaps the greatest musical of them all. Actors such as Edward Norton, Julia Roberts, Tim Roth and Alan Alda seem to revel in letting their hair down and belting out old standards.

Very little happens over the course of the film’s running time but the set-pieces would be the envy of David Beckham in his prime, most notably the rendition of “Enjoy Yourself (It's Later Than You Think)” performed by a group of corpses, and the sublime moment in which Hawn and Allen dance on the banks of the Seine and, out of nowhere, Hawn’s character begins to float through the air. It is a timely reminder of the magical and redemptive power of music and cinema and the highlight of one of the director’s most purely enjoyable works.