Fade in: "Zelig"

Never had the boundaries between Woody Allen's screen comedies and his high-concept New Yorker pieces appeared so thin as in 1983's Zelig - and so he compensated by turning in one of his most formally inventive and dazzling works. This was Allen's tremendously convincing mock-documentary/satire on the myth of American individualism: its subject, Leonard "The Human Chameleon" Zelig (Allen himself in mocked-up photos and newsreel), achieves wild success in the first half of the 20th century by fitting in at all points, physically shifting to resemble those around him; it's only when he finally attempts to settle down with the psychiatrist seeking a cure for his condition (Mia Farrow) that his quirks - multiple wives, just one consequence of these multiple personalities - come to light and set in motion his downfall.

Allen, for his part, was approaching the peak of his creativity, here not only crafting the film's dryly ironic narration, but also the songs ("You May Be Six People, But I Love You") and films (such as The Changing Man, a spoof Warners melodrama of 1935) inspired by Zelig's life; the doctored clips and pics predate Photoshop technology, and Allen calls as witnesses some of his higher-browed buddies (Sontag, Mailer, psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim) to lend the whole tall tale an extra credibility. It fits neatly into the director's run of fine showbiz stories - falling somewhere between Stardust Memories, Broadway Danny Rose and The Purple Rose of Cairo - in detailing Zelig's growing celebrity, but the historical angle makes this the Forrest Gump people can't look down upon: having Zelig there or thereabouts, doing as little as possible to stand out or effectuate change in others, pays off in a resonant gag when the Forties come around and our Jewish hero finds himself on the dais behind Hitler at a Nazi rally. (In this respect, the film provides the missing link between Allen and Chaplin in The Great Dictator.)

The whole is perhaps more clever than funny, but this is one of those ideas simple enough to seem both personal and universal at the same time, at once an extension of the filmmaker's self-deprecation (Zelig as the ultimate mediocrity), an expression of his inability to cope with the attention that came his way in the wake of Annie Hall and Manhattan, and of baffled amusement that the world should have bestowed such fame on such a non-entity - not to mention that it should also look so harshly upon idiosyncracy whenever and wherever it becomes apparent: as Zelig himself sums up his success, "it just shows what you can do if you're a total psychotic". The powers-that-be could have revived it ten years on from its first run, at the height of the Soon-Yi controversy, and it would have appeared no less relevant; as it is, with the everyday banalities of Big Brother having been surpassed by the outright fakery of Jersey Shore and The Only Way is Essex, it doesn't exactly seem out of place at the back end of 2011, either.

Zelig is re-released this Friday as part of the BFI Southbank's Woody Allen retrospective, details of which can be found here.