Review – The Purple Rose of Cairo

This is an awfully sentimental picture, particularly for a Woody Allen comedy. Mia Farrow plays a woman who routinely uses the movies to escape her drab life and bad marriage in Depression-era New Jersey. Her life changes drastically when one of the characters in a romance she’s watching emerges from the screen into the real world. The caricature character’s struggles to adapt to the real world (and attempts by the selfish actor who played him to get him back into the movie) provide a few laughs and plenty of what-is-reality pondering. Overall the film works well as a bittersweet ode to the escapist aspect of old Hollywood movies. Worth seeing