The Purple Rose of Cairo

Review: In the Purple Rose of Cairo, Mia Farrow plays Cecelia, a depression-era working women in an abusive marriage who escapes the hard times in reality by getting lost in movies. Woody Allen often uses fantastic elements in his films to materialize hypothetical situations on screen. In this film Allen employs this fable technique to bring to life a character from a film which Cecelia is infatuated with. The character literally walks out of the screen and whisks her away just like in the film world she is so in love with. Allen brilliantly, if not at times heavy handedly, weighs the pros and cons of fictional perfection against flawed reality. In the end it may not really matter. We are stuck in the real world and films are our great escape. This is a classic Woody Allen film and is among his best work.
Rating: 5/5