Woody Allen would later do Midnight in Paris (2011), another fantasy film where Gil (Owen Wilson), in a way never explained, transports back to the Hemingway period of Paris that he finds most ideal.
In The Purple Rose of Cairo, we have a couple of "transports" happening. First, Tom Baxter (Jeff Daniels) leaves his film to join "the real world." Later, Cecilia (Mia Farrow) will join Tom in the film world. This is a little bit different from Midnight in Paris, because these transports are actually happening, whereas in Midnight, I guess it's at least arguable that the fantasy is only happening inside Gil's mind.
I like the exploration of concept here. Tom is a film character. He follows a script and "does" only what his character is supposed to do. The way it's laid out, every time the film plays, the characters come to life, but they cannot ever change or adapt. They do the same thing in the same way every time. As I was watching, I thought about this explanation: These film characters are sort of more like characters in a play more than a film, at least in the way they conceptualize who they are and what they do. They "know" that they are in a film, and before Tom jumps into the real world, it never occurs to any of them to do what he did.
He does it because he sees Cecilia in the audience, and he noticed that she had seen the film five times. Why was she so interested in the lives of these characters? Because they represent everything she doesn't have in her own life -- adventure, wealth, romance. If the characters in the film are doomed to live the same actions screening after screening, so is she. She's a waitress during the recession, and her husband is a jobless womanizer. She's certainly unfulfilled with her life, and movies are her escape. (It's also funny and somewhat ironic that she goes to the movies to watch the same film every day, because it's the only movie playing that week at the local theater.)
When Tom leaves the film and enters the real world, "Hollywood" panics. The actor who plays Tom shows up in town, along with other Hollywood production people. They want to find out what's happened, how it happened, and how they can get Tom back in the film. Meanwhile, Toms in other cities have, for reasons never explained, started leaving the film for the real world, too. I'm, not sure this detail is necessary or helps our understanding of the movie's theme. The problem with multiple missing Toms is: 1) We know why the first Tom left -- for Cecilia. And 2) the actor and the production team try to corral the first Tom, but they don't go to the other cities to do the same thing everywhere else.
Ultimately, Cecilia loves both Tom and the actor who plays him. When forced to "choose" between them, she decides that the only thing that makes sense is to pick the human being, not the character. She does this even though she's fully aware that human beings -- her husband being the prime example -- will let you down, and this actor does just that. Nevertheless, she apparently has the maturity to recognize that movies aren't real. They are just a form of entertainment, and even after the actor playing Tom let's her down, she's back at the movies to see the new feature, Top Hat (1935). She will never have the Astaire/Rogers relationship in her own real life, but she can live vicariously through the romance their characters embody. We watch her watching them, and the camera locks in on her face. She's completely enraptured. We don't see her blink once. Astaire is singing and dancing to/for her.
Although I don't connect to this film as much as I connect with Midnight in Paris, I do admire the film's exploration or themes and its creativity.
Rating: 3.5/5 stars
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