On demand: "The Moderns"

Woody Allen had a late-career, post-scandal success with 2011's entertaining Midnight in Paris, but the best film made by an American writer-director on 1920s Paris remains 1988's The Moderns. More romantic thriller than romantic comedy, restoring elements of the film noir to their spiritual home, sometime Altman associate Alan Rudolph's movie opens with a series of loaded looks and glances among American ex-pats hanging out in the proto-creative hub known as the Café Moderne. Keith Carradine is the slumming artist who catches the eye of gangster's moll Linda Fiorentino, in part because the two share a history; John Lone, hot off The Last Emperor, is the gangster in question, a rubber baron who's made his fortune in prophylactics. Wallace Shawn is Carradine's confidant, fussing about his employers at the Herald Tribune; Kevin J. O'Connor the most quotable of all movie Hemingways ("it's easy to be hard-boiled in the daytime, but at night..."); Genevieve Bujold is the neighborhood art dealer; and Geraldine Chaplin the rich widow who inveigles our hero in a forgery plot. Having set all these cards down on the table, Rudolph and co-writer Jon Bradshaw begin to pair them up in intriguing, involving ways.

What reveals itself in the meantime is a picture fashioned by someone with quite the eye: every frame's a keeper, even if what's going on within flags both the pleasures and pitfalls of peeping. You may well come away wanting Chaplin's wallpaper, one of Carradine's knock-off Cézannes, some of the Pathé newsreel Rudolph buys in by the yard to provide atmospheric scenesetting, an item or two from the Fiorentino wardrobe, maybe even Fiorentino herself. Yet we're getting more than we might initially have bargained for: something like an Allen or Altman roundelay but with dreams, ideas and themes. Creation, recreation, procreation: this Hemingway only ever seems a scene away from inventing the trouble/desire business in Hal Hartley's Simple Men, while the relationship between Carradine's raffish playboy and Lone's misogynist vulgarian, combative to the point of entering the boxing ring, begins to resemble that between director and studio exec. They're all headed for a surprising final reel, as the whole scene moves on and everybody's legitimacy gets called into question. As floated by Mark Isham's jazz score, this is above all else a riff on this time and place, but it's a beguiling riff, sustained by the most colourful characters. More immersive than Allen's deftly drawn skit, a vibrant tableau rather than a miniature, it's apparently no less of a knock-off, filmed in a studio in Montréal, with an accordion player bussed in from Bushwick. Your eyes and brain won't mind, though: within the context of 1980s American cinema, The Moderns is all but a luxury item.

The Moderns is currently streaming via YouTube.