To Rome With Love

Woody Allen’s European Vacation continues, as the auteur continues to traverse the continent (that recently yielded his most successful film ever) with To Rome With Love—the apparently final, official title of a comedy that has previously been called Bop Decameron, Nero Fiddled, and Woody Allen’s Spicy Neurotic Meatballs, the last one mostly by us. The trailer does an able job of setting up the film’s intertwining vignettes, ambling through four separate storylines that include Penelope Cruz playing a happy hooker, Roberto Benigni mugging as an unlikely celebrity under constant media surveillance, and Jesse Eisenberg, Greta Gerwig, and Ellen Page as three boho twentysomethings about to create an adorably twee love triangle while Alec Baldwin watches. Allen himself appears on screen for the first time since Scoop, pairing off with Judy Davis to kvetch and make Communism jokes. And while his character seems as uptight as Allen’s ever-climbing pants, judging by all the breezy comic timing, Allen is still enjoying himself out there.