Double dilemma

After a string of below par movies, Woody Allen is back on form - not top form, perhaps, but approaching it. Melinda and Melinda returns to one of his favourite subjects: life as it is lived by the middle classes in Manhattan.

His suggestion is that those who think they know when human existence is comedy and when it gets near to tragedy are deceiving themselves.

Four New Yorkers are in a restaurant. Two are playwrights. One, played by Larry Pine, is a writer of serious drama, the other (Wallace Shawn) is a purveyor of comedies; both actors are as watchable as ever.

In a rather forced discussion, the party is arguing the dual nature of human drama: one companion tells an anecdote about a certain Melinda (Radha Mitchell), a story which is part tragedy, part comedy, and asks for the writers' take on it. Shawn sees the laughter, Pine the pain. We get to watch the two tales.

The first Melinda is a pillpopping wreck who arrives uninvited at a dinner party and soon succeeds in disturbing everybody, notably Will Ferrell, who is married to Amanda Peet, and Chloë Sevigny, who is married to Jonny Lee Miller.

The second Melinda is a more loveable waif. Ferrell feels less guilty about falling for her when he catches his wife in bed with another man. He is clearly the Allen substitute, and here proves that he is well up to the task of being more than just a funnyman.

But more praise should go to Mitchell, who plays her dual roles with real flair. She's one of those women who doubts everything about herself while attracting men by the dozen without trying.

The movie doesn't pretend to go all that deep, but still holds the attention. We are never quite certain whether to laugh at the neuroses on display or pity those bound hand and foot by them, but Allen's easy fluency in the end wins over.

Despite its plot, Melinda and Melinda isn't a particularly adventurous film. But it's the first we've seen from Allen for some time which isn't obviously recycling old stratagems.

Melinda And Melinda
Cert: 12A