Woody Allen has left the country, and the screen as well, for that matter. The iconic American film auteur appears to be in exile. Aside from two anomalies – his onscreen presence in Scoop (2006), and the domestic location of Whatever Works (2009) – Allen’s recent films – Match Point (2005), Cassandra’s Dream (2007), Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010), and Midnight in Paris (2011) – have been marked by his frequent absence as a character and/or by settings or locations outside the United States. Although Allen does appear in Scoop, it is set in London; and while Whatever Works is set in New York, Allen is absent as a character. The theme of exile is so pervasive, both externally and internally, that Allen’s recent body of work might be understood as his exilic period.

Externally, Allen’s cinematic expatriation and onscreen absence suggest a search for a new creative space for his film art. This search is dramatized explicitly in Allen’s most recent film, Midnight in Paris. In the film, the central character, Gil, takes an imaginative journey through the Paris of the 1920s, in which he receives new inspiration from the old ghosts of T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, Salvador Dali, Gertrude Stein, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Like Gil, Allen is on an imaginative journey in Europe to get his cinematic groove back and leave his whimsical trace in the hearts and minds of his faithful audiences. As A.O. Scott has pointed out in his review of Midnight in Paris, Allen’s new creative period is an attempt to “leave something behind – a bit of memorabilia, or art . . . – that catches the attention and solicits the admiration of lonely wanderers in some future time” (Scott 2011). In short, Woody Allen is seeking the redemption of his film art.

Although Allen has cited rising production costs in New York (Itzkoff 2010), and his success with European audiences (Germain 2008), as reasons for his recent cinematic exile, his expressed desire to make more serious films (Lax 2007: 184) suggests that his exile is intended to open a new creative space in his cinema. This space is produced by an inherent tension in the exilic experience itself – a tension between being and becoming, leaving and returning, despair and hope. Hamid Naficy has suggested that these exilic tensions are the source of auteurial creativity, and that “many of the greatest and most enduring works of literature and cinema have been created by displaced writers and filmmakers” (Naficy 2001: 12). One need only think of exilic writers such as James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov, Joseph Conrad, Samuel Beckett, and Salman Rushdie; or filmmakers such as Andre Tarkovsky, Jonas Mekas, Stanley Kubrick, or Fernando Solanas. When artists experience or precipitate this type of dislocation, it produces a space of creative tension between who they were and who they are becoming; between their departure from traditional spaces and the possibility of their return; between their artistic stagnation and their hope of new aesthetic insights. Naficy refers to this space as “an agonistic form of liminality” where artists are

freed from the old and the new, they are “deterritorialized,” yet they continue to be in the grip of both the old and the new, the before and the after. Located in such a slip zone, they can be suffused with hybrid success, or they may feel deprived and divided, even fragmented (2001: 12).

The dislocation of the artist becomes a place of deprivation and liberation – a space in which a break with the past is both necessary and impossible, and a new period of creativity emerges as a possibility. By dislocating his cinema from the United States, and removing himself from the screen, Allen has produced the necessary tension in order to enter a new creative period in his work.

Allen’s exilic period is his most serious period yet. In an interview with Eric Lax prior to filming Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Allen lamented his role in Scoop because it limited his ability to make a serious picture, and he indicated that it was unlikely that he would ever be on the screen again. He explained:

When I wrote Scoop I put myself in it because I felt, I haven’t been in a film in a while, I should do it. But I really dislike the experience of having to make sure if I’m in it that there is a Woody Allen character. So I vowed that I wouldn’t do that. And I won’t be in the one I do in Barcelona, either, which is going to be a serious picture. Maybe never again. It limits me when I am conceiving a project to have to think that there needs to be a Woody Allen character, because that immediately requires it to be a certain type of movie. I’m not going to be able to write Cries and Whispers or The Bicycle Thief and accommodate my character (Lax 2007: 184).

The Woody Allen persona as an onscreen presence “limits” Allen’s auteurial aspirations to make films like Bergman’s and de Sica’s – films that are visually poetic, emotionally penetrating, and that leave the burden of tragedy unresolved. By removing himself from the screen – going into cinematic exile – Allen is initiating a break with his previous film art. Moreover, his designation of Cries and Whispers and The Bicycle Thief as paragons of cinematic excellence suggests that this new period in his work will be marked by ethical concerns.¹

This ethical turn in Allen’s work can be seen in the internal use of a mise-en-scène of exile in his recent films. For example, his use of European backdrops in England, Spain, and France represent a break with his traditional New York cityscapes and interiors. These backdrops serve as exilic frames for his dislocated characters struggling to find redemption – a recovery of wholeness from their fragmentary and alienated existences. In Match Point, Chris Wilton, the young tennis pro, is in exile from his humble Irish beginnings, and from his career in professional tennis, while Nola Rice is in exile from her failing acting career in Colorado. In Cassandra’s Dream, the two brothers, Ian and Terry Blaine, are seeking an exile from their working class existences, and their wealthy uncle Harold faces a criminal exile in prison. In Scoop, Sondra Pransky is an American college journalist living abroad, and her ghostly source, Joe Strombel, is living in a permanent exile from living. In Vicky Cristina Barcelona, both Vicky and Cristina take a summer exile in Spain where they stay with the expatriates Judy and Mark Nash. In Whatever Works, Boris Yelnikoff lives in exile from the “failed species” of the human race, and the young runaway, Melodie St. Anne, is in exile from her rural home in Mississippi. In You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, exiles abound! Alfie Shepridge is in exile from his marriage, Roy Channing is an expat novelist from the United States, and Dia is from a family of Indian exiles. In Midnight in Paris, Gil is in an imaginative exile from the shallow and pretentious world he lives in with his materialist fiancée. The exilic experiences of each of these characters become ethical starting points for redemption. Homi K. Bhabha has noted the ethical implications of exile:

If in everyday speech and writing, we consciously read “exile” as enforced displacement and dislocation, then it is worth remembering that the term also carries within it, invisibly, unconsciously, its Latin root, salire: “to leap.” It is an ethical “leap” that requires us, in a kind of bounding, boundary-breaking movement to move, as Benjamin suggests, beyond “our metropolitan streets and furnished rooms”; to revise our knowledge of some of the “savage” discourses of power, possession, knowledge and belonging, that rise from the uncanny far-flung ruins and debris of metropolitan discourse (Bhabha 1999: xii).

Although exile is conventionally understood as an externally imposed state, Bhabha emphasizes the way the exilic experience is appropriated by dislocated persons. Whether exile is externally enforced or self-imposed, the experience is the same. Exile, spatially and metaphorically, is a transgressive movement across borders that constitutes a break with previous locations and commitments. Allen’s mise-en-scène of exile frames his characters’ struggle for redemption by locating them on the boundary between conventional understandings of themselves and others, where they encounter startling new visions of themselves and their ethical responsibility for others.

As Vittorio Hösle has noted, Woody Allen “is a profoundly philosophical comedian” (Hösle 2007: x). More precisely, he is a profoundly ethical comedian; that is to say, he takes ethics seriously, even if often in a comic way. While scholars of Allen’s films have endlessly explored the existentialist themes in his work, and linked him to philosophers such as Schopenhauer (Ascione 2004: 133), Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre, Heidegger (Detmer 2004: 193), and even more theological thinkers like Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik (Lee 1997: 108–111), few have considered the resonances with the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas.² Ever since Jean-Paul Sartre thumbed through the pages of Levinas’ dissertation, Théorie de l’intuition dans la phénomenologie de Husserl, the philosophy of Levinas has exerted a substantial influence on continental philosophy (Lechte 1994: 115). Indeed, Derrida, Blanchot, Irigaray, and Lyotard all take their cue from Levinas’ “rethinking of the concept and reality of the Other [Autrui]” (Lechte 1994: 115). This reconsideration of the place of alterity in philosophy was Levinas’ attempt to make ethics “first philosophy” instead of ontology (the study of being). As Richard Cohen has put it,

Levinas insists on ethics, on a metaphysical responsibility, an exorbitant and infinite responsibility for other human beings, to care not for being, for the unraveling of its plot, but for what is beyond and against being, the alterity of the other (Levinas 1985: 3).

Levinas emphasized the primordial ethical relationship of the self and other as the constitutive factor of being human – to be human is to be in relation with others. This primordial ethical relationship is a nonreciprocal face-to-face encounter between ourselves and others, in which a Thou confronts an I and demands a response. The I, in its awareness of the other, is aware of both his capacity and responsibility to respond to the presence of the other, and therefore, his capacity to accept or reject the other. For Levinas, ethics was about a journey out of the ontological narcissism of subjectivity towards the other. This journey demanded a “substitution” of self for the other, who calls my “appropriation of the world” into question (Levinas 1981: 119, xxix). Levinas’ ethical philosophy is best understood as a journey that is simultaneously an exile of the self from itself towards responsibility for the other, and a redemption of the self by means of substituting oneself for the other.

The close correlation between exile and redemption in Allen’s recent films resonates with the ethical philosophy of Levinas. Contemporary film theorists, such as Sarah Cooper (2006) and Sam Girgus (2010), have recently begun to apply the ethical philosophy of Levinas to film. Following the pioneering work of Michael Renov (2004), Cooper has applied Levinas’ anti-ocular notion of visage to French documentary film, as a means of excavating the invisible asymmetrical relations between self and other that both traverse and rupture the filmic (2006: 12). Cooper’s analysis probes the ethical dimensions of documentary film that are both continuous and discontinuous with the temporal and narrative structures of the film. Girgus has made similar applications to narrative films. By rethinking Levinas’ notions of time, ethics, and the feminine, and their relationship to film, Girgus has highlighted a body of films that “enact the struggle to achieve ethical transcendence by subordinating the self to the greater responsibility for the other,” – a self-abnegating journey towards the other which unfolds as a transition from being (ontological identity) to being-for (ethical subjectivity) (Girgus 2010: 5). Girgus argues that this ethical journey is dramatized within what he calls “the cinema of redemption,” as he explains:

I introduce this term, the cinema of redemption, to apply a Levinasian lens to the examination of the quest in film for a redeeming ethical experience that centers on the priority of the other. The journey transforms what Levinas, in “Substitution,” terms the “ontological adventure” (Emmanuel Levinas, 86) of immediate, immanent experience into the ‘ethical adventure of the relationship to the other person’ (Levinas, Time and the Other, 33). The films in the cinema of redemption dramatize the struggle for this transformation from being to ethics. They articulate a crisis of the change from ontological identity to ethical subjectivity (2010: 5).

The transition from ontological identity to ethical subjectivity is a place of crisis. It is an ethical crossroads where the ethical subject finds herself torn asunder by an infinite demand placed on her by the other. This experience of an infinite ethical demand is analogous to a trauma, which ruptures the subject and creates an ethical tension in which the subject becomes aware of their capacity for accepting or rejecting the other and provides the conditions for the possibility of redemption – the recovery of wholeness by means of ethical responsibility. The films in Allen’s exilic period are inscribed with this ethical tension, making redemption a core theme of this new creative period.

Match Point stands out as Allen’s most ethical film in his exilic period. This film represents Allen’s opening gambit in his exploration of what might be termed a difficult redemption – a search for redemption that is ambiguous and often fails. It is a deeply ethical film that takes seriously the separation between self and other, the conflict between love and desire, the primordial responsibility for the other, and the inevitability of moral failure. The film blends narrative strands from Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Theodore Dreiser’s American Tragedy, and George Stevens’ film adaptation of Dreiser’s novel, A Place in the Sun (1951), as well as Allen’s own previous ethical experiments in Crimes and Misdemeanors. These narrative references suggest a tragic search for redemption – one doomed to failure. Girgus has noted this fragile, ambiguous, and difficult pursuit of redemption as a distinctive characteristic of the European cinema of redemption, whose “films become frustrated on the road to redemption, often confronting profound, and sometimes insurmountable obstacles” (2010: 23). Match Point can be situated within this category of the cinema of redemption. Chris Wilton’s search for redemption from the mediocrity and meaninglessness of modern bourgeois life is a struggle between his egoistic enjoyment of the world and his increasing awareness of the infinite ethical demand of responsibility for others. Chris’s seemingly endless pleasure cruise from the rural coasts of mediocrity to isles of aristocratic decadence is interrupted by those who have made it possible. In this film, Allen weaves a tragic thread of frustration, ambiguity, failure, and despair into Chris’s pursuit of redemption.

The difficult redemption of Match Point is framed and organized by Allen’s mise-en-scène of exile. Chris Wilton searches for personal regeneration and social rebirth that can occur only in a confrontation with forces outside of himself. The difficulty comes when he is confronted with the choice between satisfying the desires of his ego and his ethical responsibility for those around him. At one point in the film, after learning that his lover Nola Rice is pregnant, Chris seems intent on revealing his affair to his wife, but eventually he loses his nerve. Sensing that something is wrong, Chloe asks him if he is having an affair. Staring out the window of their high-rise apartment, Chris surveys the new shiny world that is now laid out before him; but then he turns to Chloe to answer her question, her face confronting him with his responsibility to her as a husband and to the family they are trying to create, but he cannot summon the moral courage to admit his affair. The scene concludes with Chris making only a vague confession that he feels “guilty,” but he does not say why. To do so would be to sacrifice his new aristocratic status, and this he cannot bring himself to do. His redemption will require an exile of the ego – a journey out of himself, in which he accepts that he is always, and already, responsible for the other. Chris’s redemption will require that he face the other.

Allen’s mise-en-scène of exile traverses Match Point in a Levinasian double movement of what Abi Doukhan has referred to as an “exile of the face,” and an “exile of the self” (Doukhan 2010: 235). The concept of exile lies at the core of Levinas’ ethical philosophy (Doukhan 2010: 235). Contrary to Jacques Derrida’s thesis that the concept of hospitality – the welcoming of the transcendence of the stranger – was central to the philosophy of Levinas, Doukhan argues that “exile constitutes the very structure of hospitality of the face”; that is, exile provides the conditions for the possibility of hospitality – redemption of the self by means of passivity to, and responsibility for, the other (2010: 235). Within this double movement there are four discernible moments: separation and summons (exile of the face), and refusal and return (exile of the self). These four moments represent a Levinasian paradigm for mapping Allen’s exploration of a difficult redemption in his exilic period. Girgus’s analysis of the final scene of La dolce vita offers a succinct example of these four moments in a single scene:

In the concluding scene of La dolce vita a “monster” from the sea washes ashore to the amazement of giddy onlookers and exhausted partygoers, who stop to stare back at the dead fish’s single grotesque eye. Marcello looks and moves away from the single eye to look across a small inlet to a beautiful gesturing figure, the girl from Perugia, Paola (Valeria Ciangottini), who has been the embodiment in the film of innocence. Connection between them proves impossible, however, because Marcello cannot bring himself to respond seriously to her gestures (Girgus 2010: 12).

Girgus’s ethical analysis of this scene³ isolates the four moments of a difficult redemption. First, there is the visual separation between self and other (Paola and Marcello are separated by a small inlet). The inlet is “small,” and yet, paradoxically, difficult to cross, because it requires a journey from being-for-oneself to being-for-the-other. In Levinasian terms, this separation represents the “absolute interval of separation” between the self and the other (Levinas 1969: 110). Second, there is a moral summons (Paola’s gesture to Marcello to cross the inlet) that originates from the face, and entails an ethical obligation to the other for which every response is inadequate. For Levinas, this summons is constitutive of the human condition and involves an infinite demand – a demand that exceeds our ability to respond, but nevertheless requires our response – for absolute ethical responsibility to the other – a relationship that precedes, and exceeds, the limits of the individual self and aspires to the infinite. Third, there is a refusal to accept the fact of this infinite responsibility for the other (Marcello refuses Paola’s invitation to cross the inlet). This refusal constitutes the ethical murder of the other – a refusal to acknowledge one’s intrinsic relationship to the other, which is a refusal to welcome or offer hospitality. Fourth, there is a return to the prison of one’s own ego (Marcello returns to his narcissistic life in despair). Instead of embarking on an ethical revolution through an exiling of the self, the self returns to itself, and undergoes an involution into narcissistic despair. These four movements – separation, summons, refusal, and return – of a difficult redemption are paradigmatic of Allen’s recent exploration of redemption in his exilic period.

Allen’s exploration of the difficulty of redemption in Match Point centers on an old trope in his work that is given a new ethical focus in this film: luck. In the opening narration, Chris Wilton praises the aleatory nature of life when he says that the person who said that he “would rather be lucky than good,” recognized that much in life is out of one’s control. While this insight fills most people with fear and trepidation, Chris embraces it. He too, would rather be lucky than good. In a lucky life there are many possibilities, according to Chris, but few in a good life. He views his life as a wager, and is willing to “risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,” as Kipling put it in his poem “If” (Kipling 2007: 170). This commitment to luck opens Chris to unforeseen possibilities of love and rejection, success and failure – outcomes that are beyond one’s control. It inaugurates an Abrahamic journey to the unknown land of the other.

Chris embarks upon an erotic adventure that he hopes will lead to a life of love, success, and the joie de vivre that has eluded him thus far in his career as a struggling tennis pro. He is romancing the unknown – courting transcendence – by gambling on whether his serve will drive the ball over the net or fall short of it. His erotic adventure resembles what Levinas described as an ethical passivity, that both constitutes the subject, and renders him vulnerable to the other (Levinas 1981: 15). J. Allan Mitchell has noted the similarities between medieval notions of courtly love and Levinas’ conception of ethical relations. He writes that “amatory fortune [the possibility of future love] makes ethics possible,” because:

the possibility of ethics as radical passivity before fortune and future contingency: a passivity that resembles a kind of courtship, given its demanding waiting period and uncertain end, its privileging of heteronomy over the autonomy of the self, its disavowal of self-sufficiency, and its subjection of self to other (Mitchell 2005: 102).

When Chris begins his journey from his humble Irish origins to the inner sanctum of the British upper class, he is making a wager before a “future contingency” – hoping for fortune while recognizing the possibility of utter failure. In privileging luck over goodness, Chris is subjecting his autonomous search for “the good life” to the heteronomy of chance. His quest for a lucky life constitutes an ethical passivity that both forms him and renders him vulnerable to failing in his search for redemption and his ethical responsibility for others.

But Chris’s ethical passivity is complicated by his conflicted egoistic love for his wealthy wife, Chloe Hewett, who paves the way for his life of wealth and privilege, and his lover Nola Rice, in whom he finds an irresistible source of pleasure. Chris’s struggle for meaning and status is a way of recreating himself that takes place in the conflict between love and desire. However, this search for regeneration and rebirth falls short of Levinasian ethical redemption. As Levinas writes, “in order for Redemption to be accomplished, love cannot remain at the mercy of the individual” (1993: 59). Love, for Levinas, goes beyond individual whim to entail ethical demand. Love is a redemptive act, according to Levinas. It is a journey out of the confines of subjectivity towards the other – an exiling of the individual. This exilic journey of redemption is not a divine work of God upon humanity, but rather a human work that occurs in the ethical relationships of human beings. Redemption is “the love of one’s neighbor” which is the human response to God’s love for humanity (Levinas 1990: 192). However, as the “slaughter-bench” of human history shows, with its wars, genocides, and atrocities, love of neighbor is the exception, rather than the rule. In Match Point, desire, not love, carries the day. Chris discovers the inherent risk that love of one’s neighbor poses to the ego, and Allen dramatizes this risk through his exploration of a difficult redemption. From a Levinasian perspective, Allen’s form of exile can be interpreted as a love quest that renders the individual vulnerable to the transcendence of the other. It is not a quest of desire that seeks to return to the cave of egoistic enjoyment. Rather, it is an endless journey into the land of the stranger, in which one remains radically passive to,⁴ and infinitely responsible for, the other – an ethical journey of redemption. Radical passivity to the other – the abandonment of egoistic enjoyment – constitutes the conditions for the possibility of ethical action.

But love is nothing if not difficult, in the exilic films of Woody Allen. As a character in his own films, Allen continually searches for love, finds it, and inevitably loses it. His other characters face the same failures in love. As Foster Hirsch has noted, the “characters in Allen’s movies are forever missing each other, failing to connect; no wonder his heroes are always on the prowl, the perfect, enduring relationship forever eluding them” (2001: 166). Their love seems to “remain at the mercy of the individual” – an especially egoistic, self-centered act. Allen’s view of love has traditionally been interpreted along Sartrean lines, because Allen repeatedly depicts love as a fragile magic spell that can be broken at any time, and that reduces the other to a mere object of sexual desire (Lee 1997: 309–316). However, Match Point lends itself to a more Levinasian interpretation, in which the contingency and fragility of love become the conditions for the possibility of ethics. In this film, love is depicted as a difficult search for redemption – a struggle to liberate love from the confines of the desirous ego that wants simply to encompass and possess, and this is precisely where Chris Wilton fails.

Chris’s ethical passivity to the contingency of the future creates an awareness of the interval of separation between himself and other characters. This interval constitutes the first moment of the exile of the face (separation), in which the other remains beyond the encompassing grasp of the individual self, and yet, engenders (and perhaps seduces) a response. It is as if he is standing on a shore looking out into the vast and seemingly infinite ocean, watching the horizon for his future to appear. He cannot traverse the interval, he is subject to it, and it is precisely this subjection to the impossibility of possessing and controlling those around him for his own pleasure and benefit that constitutes Chris’s dilemma. Both Chloe and Nola continually exceed his possessive grasp, and call his insatiable desire into question. For Levinas, ethics is a journey out of the ontological narcissism of subjectivity towards the other. This journey begins as a “substitution” of the self for the other, the one who calls my “appropriation of the world” into question (Levinas 1981: 119, xxix). Girgus has described this journey as “a struggle to achieve ethical transcendence by subordinating the self to the greater responsibility for the other” (2010: 5). Chris’s dilemma hinges precisely on this ethical problematic – redemption of self through responsibility for the other. Chris cannot have one without the other. He must embark upon a journey across this interval of separation between himself and the other – the person and relationship greater than himself. In Chris’s case, this specifically means his relationship to both women.

This interval of separation is dramatized through Allen’s construction of scenes in which characters are separated by small obstacles or distances. These scenes frame the tension between the characters in their physical relationship to each other, and suggest an ethical abyss between them that is difficult, if not impossible, to cross. These scenes exhibit the first movement of Allen’s exploration of the struggle for redemption, and resonate with what Levinas called the “absolute interval of separation” between the self and the other (Levinas 1969: 110). Although for Levinas’ this interval of separation is neither visible nor spatial, film provides a medium for exploring this metaphysical concept in spatial images. In the movement of the exile of the face, it is the inner life of the other that remains in exile, beyond the grasp of the self, so that the approach of the other is simultaneously a departure. We are never able to fully comprehend the deep mystery of another person. All of our conceptualizations of the other are wholly inadequate to express who the other is. This creates an intractable interval between the ethical subject and the other, and marks the other with a strangeness, and it is precisely this strangeness that ruptures the subject – interrupts the egoistic enjoyment that interpret everyone and everything in the world as an object of desire – and constitutes a summons to ethical responsibility.

In Match Point, Allen represents this separation through a pattern of encounter and absence. The relationship of Chris and Nola develops along a trajectory of pursuit and withdrawal. During the first half of the film, Allen alternates scenes of encounter with scenes of absence. These encounters are framed around spatial intervals in which characters are separated by obstacles and distances. The intervals grow smaller as Chris pursues Nola for his own enjoyment, but increase as she withdraws from him. After each encounter Allen constructs scenes that make Nola’s absence palpable, and Chris’s passivity explicit.

The first encounter between Chris and Nola occurs over a ping-pong table. Chris enters the room just as Nola defeats an opponent. Her faceless voice is heard inquiring, as if from another world, about her next “victim.” When her face appears, she directs her request to Chris, and summons him to a game. He aces his first serve and crosses the table to coach her in the art of table tennis. Chris attempts to seduce Nola, but she refuses his advances, remaining beyond his grasp. Eventually, his friend Tom walks in and introduces Nola as his fiancée. After the brief introduction, Nola kisses Tom and leaves the room. Her absence remains as a lingering presence in Chris’s facial expressions and in his questions about her to Tom.

The second encounter occurs in a restaurant over a table where Chris and Chloe join Tom and Nola for dinner. This time Chris cannot cross the table without offending his friend Tom, or ruining his relationship with Tom’s sister, Chloe. Instead, Chris pursues Nola through covert glances, trying to visually seduce her and capture her affections, but she remains at the perimeter of his ocular advances. She refuses to be captured in the frame of his amorous vision. At one point in the conversation, while she discusses her acting career, and her desire not to appear as a failure to those in her hometown in Colorado, she says, “not that I am ever going back to Colorado – ever!” Allen captures Chris’s face in a close-up, after this prescient remark. His expression registers the possibility of Nola’s future absence – if her acting career fails in London, she may return to Colorado, in spite of her words to the contrary. Her absence becomes explicit in a later scene where Chris convinces Chloe that they should join Tom and Nola at the cinema to watch Motorcycle Diaries. When Chris and Chloe arrive, only Tom emerges from the taxi, announcing that Nola is ill and cannot make it. Again, Allen captures her absence in a close-up of Chris’s face, which expresses his vulnerability to Nola – the way in which he is captured by her, rather than the other way around. Nola continues to remain beyond Chris’s grasp, and Chris remains in pursuit of her.

A third encounter occurs in a field after Nola is insulted by her fiancé’s mother while visiting the Hewett country home. Nola leaves the house, and walks out into a large field. Chris sees her through a window walking away from the house. Allen frames Nola in a window pane with a long grassy path separating Chris from her as he watches her depart. Again, Nola’s withdrawal – the interval of separation between her and Chris – reveals that Chris is primarily the object of Nola and not the other way around. Chris is radically passive to Nola – he is affected by her before any of his attempts to affect her. He pursues her in the rain, attempting to traverse the interval by means of a sexual encounter. He wants to possess her and enjoy her. When he finally catches up with her, she gives into his advances. But even after this steamy tryst in the rain, Nola remains beyond Chris’s grasp. Allen follows this scene of pursuit and encounter with scenes of withdrawal and absence. Chris confronts Nola at the opera one evening, after she has treated him coldly. She tells him that their encounter was only a “moment” and cannot continue. When Chris eventually learns that her relationship with Tom Hewett has ended, he begins to search for her, but he learns that she has moved out of her apartment – she has returned to Colorado after all. Her absence becomes a traumatic experience for Chris. She is in exile, beyond his reach, and her absence calls his life into question.

Although it would seem that Allen has made Chris into the most unlikeable character in the film, when Match Point is compared to George Stevens’ A Place in the Sun (1951), it becomes clear that Allen is attempting to preserve a tension in Chris’s character. Chris is like George Eastman, a common man seeking a new life in an aristocratic world. Chris is everyman, and at the same time, what every man wants to avoid becoming. He embodies the aspirations of the common man and the vicious desire for advancement into high society. It seems as though Allen wants the audience both to identify with Chris, and to be repulsed by what they find both he and themselves capable of.

Nola’s withdrawal and absence illustrates what Levinas means with his notion of exile of the face. For Levinas, the face was not simply the physical-phenomenological face, but the “pure expression” of the other – the expressivity of the deepest dimension of human being and the locus of the ethical relationship (Bergo 1999: 99, 90). What Levinas is attempting to convey is the ineffable sacredness of the human subject. Language fails effectively to communicate this unique dimension of the human being, so Levinas uses difficult and often paradoxical language to express this crucial ethical insight. Allen is attempting to communicate something similar in his mise-en-scène of exile. In the exile of the face, this dimension is always incomplete – something remains hidden, and undisclosed to the individual subject. In Totality and Infinity Levinas referred to this hiddenness as an “absence” and a nakedness”:

The nakedness of the face is not what is presented to me because I disclose it, what would therefore be presented to me, to my powers, to my eyes, to my perceptions, in light exterior to it. The face has turned to me – and this is its very nudity. It is by itself and not by reference to a system . . . The transcendence of the face is at the same time its absence from this world into which it enters, the exiling [depaysement] of a being, his condition for being stranger, destitute, or proletarian (Levinas 1969: 75).

The nakedness of the face always eludes the conceptualizing grasp of the self, and remains a mystery, shrouded in alterity. However, as Doukhan points out, “while the face will not be approached on the cognitive level, it is nevertheless possible to approach it, according to Levinas, on the sensible level” (2010: 237). The sensible level is prior to the cognitive level, according to Levinas, and is the source of enjoyment (Levinas 1969: 138–139; Doukhan 2010: 237). But enjoyment of objects or persons is always an “involution,” a “withdrawal into oneself” (Levinas, 1969: 118), and consequently, “enjoyment is without object” (Doukhan 2010: 238). Enjoyment is completely, and innocently, egoistic, as Levinas explains:

In enjoyment I am absolutely for myself. Egoist without reference to the Other, I am alone without solitude, innocently egoist and alone. Not against the Others, not “as for me . . .” – but entirely deaf to the Other, outside of all communication and all refusal to communicate – without ears, like a hungry stomach (Levinas 1969: 134).

The involution of enjoyment leaves the face of the other in exile, where no approach is possible. But it is precisely this exilic character of the other – its strangeness, destitution and nakedness – that indirectly intrudes upon the self and ruptures it. As Doukhan points out, the life of enjoyment – happiness – where “the whole world is mine to possess” and enjoy, is the condition that makes the intrusion of the destitute other possible (2010: 239). Egoistic enjoyment proceeds under the illusion of absolute solitude, but this illusion is shattered by the inescapable presence of the other. We are never absolutely alone. We are always in relation to others. It is precisely Chris’s desire to use Chloe, and possess Nola, that produces his awareness of the hidden presence of their faces and calls his solitary life into question. Chloe’s naive innocence and consistent unselfish generosity make Chris’s relentless enjoyment of the wealth and privilege that their relationship brings him increasingly difficult. Chris becomes aware that Chloe is an end and not simply a means. Nola’s desire for a deeper love and commitment to her and their child call Chris’s insatiable desires into question. He cannot simply enjoy her, he must love her, too. Her true nakedness exceeds that of her body – a sacred excess that overwhelms Chris. These revelations come in the form of a summons – a call to ethical responsibility that Chris cannot escape.

After Chris and Chloe are married, he sees Nola again at the Tate Modern in London. Her return in this scene serves as a turning point in the pursuit/withdrawal motif in the film, in which scenes of Chris’s pursuit of Nola are followed by scenes of her withdrawal or absence. Chris sees Nola from a distance on an escalator in the Tate. She is still separated from him by an ethical distance that parallels their physical distance, and withdrawing from him down an escalator. He pursues her through the building, and finally finds her standing in a gallery before a large painting with her back turned to him – still in the mode of exile. She begins to turn slowly, scanning the rest of the gallery when she notices Chris, standing at a distance and facing her. In a single shot, Allen captures the two characters standing still, facing each other from a short distance. As Chris approaches her, Allen pans back and forth between their faces: each face is filled with uncertain anticipation. Finally, facing Nola, Chris speaks nervously, interrogating her about where she has been, where she is living, what her phone number is, and when he can see her. Nola is resistant, but Chris will not give up, until his wife Chloe appears unexpectedly. After a brief period of polite chatting, Chloe leaves Chris and Nola to finish their conversation, and he asks for her number again. This time she gives it to him. In giving her number to him, she gives him access to her, but this access involves a summons – a demand for ethical responsibility.

The second moment of the exile of the face (summons) begins when Chris and Nola begin having an affair. This affair becomes the locus of a summons to responsibility. At the beginning of the affair, Chris is insatiable and aggressive. Allen films him on top of Nola, pinning her against walls, and beds, and tearing her clothes off. But as the relationship develops, the roles change, and Nola begins to take charge of their sexual encounters. In one scene, Nola blindfolds Chris, epitomizing Chris’s ethical blindness to her. As the relationship intensifies, Chris becomes torn between his unruly desire for Nola, and his desire to preserve the wealth and prosperity he has achieved through his marriage to Chloe. He is faced with the central ethical dilemma of the film: the summons to move from enjoyment to love – a summons to redemption, to a wholeness that includes the other. This redemption will require Chris to respond to the ethical summons of both Chloe and Nola, but because he cannot love both women equally, failure looms on the horizon. He is faced with either self-abnegation or the rejection of the other.

Allen uses Chloe’s father Alec as an ethical counter-image in the film. Chris admires Chloe’s father because, as he tells Chloe one evening, her father is “wealthy but not stuffy, enjoying his fortune, having a grand time, supporting the arts.” But, Chris misses the most important quality of Chloe’s father: he lives for his family. He is a generous and hospitable man. He makes room for others – even Chris. He demonstrates what Levinas described as “morality itself” – existing for another instead of existing for oneself (Levinas 1969: 261). Both Chloe and Nola summon Chris to a life similar to Alec’s, an existence for-the-other – a life of ethical responsibility. But the lure of an existence of egoistic enjoyment creates a tension between these two ethical poles in Chris. Frequently, Allen captures this tension in the anguish of Chris’s expression, which reveals a dissonance between his awareness of the summons and the lure of his ego. The summons constitutes a rupture of Chris’s egoistic enjoyment.

The first summons to responsibility occurs when Nola eventually becomes pregnant, and calls Chris to inform him. Allen uses a phone conversation to dramatize the summons as an intrusive demand. Allen depicts them in separate interior spaces. Chris dines with his wife’s family in their luxurious home, one that serves to insulate them from the world, while Nola sits alone in her small London flat. The phone call ruptures the safety of Chris’s space of enjoyment. When Nola tells Chris that she is pregnant, she interrupts his egoistic seclusion and calls upon him to take responsibility for her and the child he has fathered. It is a request to welcome the stranger (the child) and to provide hospitality. For Chris, this summons is an opportunity for redemption, but he hesitates to respond. He realizes the difficulty. He understands what he would be required to sacrifice: his wealth, privilege, and pleasure. He would be required to go into exile, and subordinate his egoistic existence for the existences of Nola and their child. He tells her he will talk to her the following day and hangs up.

Children themselves serve as a summons in Match Point – they are the demand of an absent presence that cannot be commanded. They arrive unexpectedly, as if by chance, or luck, throughout the film. In spite of fertility science, Chloe seems incapable of becoming pregnant in the film. Children are discussed throughout the film, but remain absent. It is only in the final scene that a child even appears. They are the symbols of the self become other, or as Levinas put it, the child is “me a stranger to myself” (Levinas 1969: 267). The child is the heteronymous approach of the self as other, which ruptures the autonomous existence of the self. As Lisa Guenther has commented,

the child is not merely the offspring of biological repetition, or the cultural product or “work” of the parent. Rather, the child to whom I give birth is an Other whose arrival alters my own existence; he is myself become an Other . . . For Levinas, the alterity of the child engenders in the parent an alteration of the self, a transformation from one who is welcomed to one who welcomes an Other; this transformation also alters the self’s relation to past and future time (Guenther 2006: 77).

For Levinas, children introduce a new dimension of intensity to the ethical encounter. Children, as the self become other, rupture the egoism of the parent and make a visible ethical demand on them. The alterity of the child summons the parent to hospitality and responsibility. Allen’s use of children in the film is perhaps his most brilliant exhibition of his mise-en-scène of exile. By using the absent presence of children anticipated in the womb, born, aborted, and murdered, Allen expresses the rupturing presence of the other – the primordial ethical relationship. He is weaving a dark ethical thread into the tapestry of this narrative that creates a moral tension in the film. The other is constantly approaching in the film, summoning everyone to responsibility.

In fact, each sexual relationship in the film eventually produces a child. Tom ends up marrying a woman after getting her pregnant, and taking responsibility for her and the child. Chloe wants Chris to make her pregnant, and they try unsuccessfully throughout the film, achieving success only towards the end. Nola becomes pregnant as well. Her pregnancy threatens Chris with the approach of an other who will make an infinite demand on him – self-abnegation and substitution. Chris’s wealth and success are threatened. Nola demands that Chris divorce Chloe, marry her, and take responsibility for their child. She tells Chris that she expects him to do the “right thing.” But the journey of self-abnegation proves too difficult for him. He suggests that Nola abort the child – refuse the other hospitality – murder the other. But Nola tells him that she can’t do that again. She had aborted a child as a young woman, and another for Tom, but she could not bring herself to abort this child. Nola will not refuse to offer hospitality to the other. Chris is left with at an ethical crossroads where the two paths of welcome and murder stretch out before him.

The most dramatic example of an ethical summons of the film occurs when Chris lies to Nola about going on a trip for three weeks, and promises to tell Chloe that he wants a divorce when he returns. When Nola learns that he is still in town and avoiding her, she confronts him outside his and Chloe’s apartment and begins shouting at him “You are a liar! A liar! A liar!” Her shouting ruptures the quietness of his life and the secrecy of their relationship. She demands to speak with Chloe. Her summons to responsibility is now a demand. He must not abandon her, or refuse her hospitality. He must not ethically murder her. Her demand dramatizes the “primordial expression” of the face of the other, which Levinas described as the commandment “you shall not commit murder” (Levinas 1969: 199). Chris realizes he can no longer avoid her summons. He finally tells Nola that he will “do the right thing,” but for Chris, “the right thing” is simply the most expedient thing.

The second movement of Allen’s exploration of a difficult redemption is marked by failure. At the crossroads between welcome and murder, Chris is summoned by Nola and their unborn child to an “exile of the self,” where he must substitute himself for Nola and their child. His ego must undergo a radical transformation by experiencing exile himself – “a de-centering, a de-positing of itself as the center of the universe” (Doukhan 2010: 235). This is the path of hospitality, which as Doukhan points out, requires

recognizing that the world is not my sole possession, that the other also has a claim on it too; it is to acknowledge my own exile in the world, my own home-less-ness within a world which is no more unquestionably mine, which does not revolve around me anymore (2010: 242).

This is redemption, a self-abnegating act of generosity that creates space for the other. But Chris is unwilling to answer the summons to responsibility. He refuses to go into exile.

Nola has called Chris’s life of enjoyment into question and ruptured his ego with an infinite demand. As Doukhan notes, “the other casts a shadow upon that relationship of possession, his/her presence problematizes this relationship” (2010: 239). Nola casts a shadow on Chris’s chronic mineness, and converts his enjoyment into a problem. This problem dislocates Chris, and evokes an awareness of his responsibility for the other. This is precisely what Levinas means by ethics, as he explains:

A calling into question of the same – which cannot occur within the egoist spontaneity of the same – is brought about by the other. We name this calling into question of my spontaneity by the presence of the Other ethics. The strangeness of the Other, his irreducibility to the I, to my thoughts and my possessions, is precisely accomplished as a calling into question of my spontaneity, as ethics (1969: 43).

But this ethical dislocation, the exile of the self does not necessarily lead toward the hospitality that Levinas sought to articulate as ethical subjectivity (1969: 27). On the contrary, the exile of the self is, initially, an ethical crossroads, where two paths open up before the ethical subject: welcome and murder.

No matter what path Chris takes, the shadow of the other remains. The summons to responsibility can be refused, but it cannot be abrogated. The ethical relationship, as Levinas tirelessly reiterated, is the essence, or the principal definition, of what it means to be human. To be human is to be in an ethical relationship with others. If, like Cain, Chris chooses to cast off his responsibility for Nola and his child, and expel them through murder in order to escape the exile of the self, he will find that the shadow of the other remains with him – the blood of the other continues to cry out. Responsibility for the other is a precondition of subjectivity. We are responsible before we are. As Levinas puts it, “the self is through and through a hostage” to the other (1981: 117; cf. Genesis 4:10). Chris’s responsibility for Nola and their child is the foundation of his self. To murder them would be to violate his ego.

Chris refuses Nola’s summons to responsibility, and murders her, their child, and Nola’s neighbor Mrs. Eastby. While in Crimes and Misdemeanors and Cassandra’s Dream murder is carried out by the hands of others acting in the perpetrators’ stead, in Match Point Allen has Chris carry it out himself. The murders, which Chris had hoped would dispel the shadow of the other, and absolve him of responsibility, prove to be less of a solace, and more of a burden. The murders dislocate Chris, and the shadows of his victims fall across his face. Even in their absence, his victims continue to interrupt and unsettle him. Allen repeatedly captures the anguish and torment on Chris’s face, which remains until the end of the film. The relation with the other cannot be severed by murder. Responsibility for the other cannot be abrogated. The revelation of the ethical relationship with the other remains as a shadow cast over the self. One cannot exist apart from this shadow of the other. As Levinas points out, the relation with the other is primordial – prior to being and existence, and prior to any act of hospitality or murder. No amount of solace can console Chris. He is guilty of murder. He, like Cain, has killed the one for whom he is responsible.

After the murders, Chris returns to the prison of his ego. Visibly disturbed, he takes a cab to the theater to meet Chloe. He wants to simply return to his life of comfort and ease, but something lingers – something that unsettles the very structure of his self. In spite of Allen’s usual nihilistic approach to morality, he seems unusually concerned with the ethical effects of others in his exilic period. In both Match Point and Cassandra’s Dream, characters commit murder and become haunted by the absent presences of their victims. In Cassandra’s Dream, Terry is tormented by the psychic presence of his murdered victim, Martin Burns. In Match Point, the presences of Mrs. Eastby, Nola, and their unborn child hang like an ethical anvil on Chris’s soul. This concern highlights the significance of Allen’s ethical turn – the concern with the primordial ethical relation between self and other. The refusal of the other does not lead back to the ego as a palace of enjoyment, but rather to a prison. Murder is not a release from the ethical relationship, as it was in Crimes and Misdemeanors, but rather reveals the inescapability of it.

In one of the final scenes, Chris is visited by the ghosts of Nola and Mrs. Eastby, who confront him with his ethical violation – his refusal of hospitality. In this scene, Allen dramatizes the primordial ethical relation of self and other, but also the infinite alterity of the other. These presences can judge, but they cannot be murdered. They remain simultaneously present and absent. They continue to hold Chris responsible in spite of his “lucky” exoneration by the police. As if recapitulating the final scene of Crimes and Misdemeanors, Allen has Chris tell Nola that “you can learn to push the guilt under the rug and go on, you have to, otherwise it overwhelms you,” but there is little sign that Chris is able to “go on.” When the next-door neighbor questions him about why she was killed, Chris waxes Hegelian and says, “the innocent are often slain to make way for a grander scheme – you were collateral damage.” But, when Mrs. Eastby reminds Chris that part of the “collateral damage” was his unborn child, he realizes that he has murdered his own child. Chokingly, he tries to justify the murders by quoting Oedipus from Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, “To never have been born may be the greatest boon of all.” The quotation is spoken by a blind Oedipus living in exile, who will soon be taken up by the gods, vindicating him of his crimes. Like Oedipus, Chris is ethically blind – he cannot see the face of the other. But there are no gods to vindicate him. He murdered freely, not by fate. He is guilty, responsible, and there will be no escaping the ethical consequences of his act, in spite of the fact that he escapes the legal consequences. Nola tells him to “prepare to pay the price.” Chris responds by saying that if he were caught and punished it would be a sign of justice and meaning in the world, but Chris fails to realize that he has already caught himself, and his punishment has begun. Even though Detective Tanner gets lucky, figuring out how Chris committed the murders in a dream, Chris avoids prosecution for the murders. Tanner’s partner informs him the next day that they caught a small-time drug addict, who had been killed during a botched robbery, and who had Mrs. Easby’s ring in his pocket. Chris gets exonerated by luck, not the gods, but his return to his life with Chloe is not without consequences.

The film ends with the birth of a son to Chloe and Chris. The child is a visual representation of the invisible presence of the child Chris murdered. His newborn son is the sign of judgment. The face of his new son becomes a sign, a perpetual summons to responsibility for the child he murdered, and for his other victims. This is particularly evident in Allen’s decision to use the aria “Una furtiva lagrima” from Gaetono Donizetti’s opera L’elisir d’amore as the closing musical piece. In this aria Nemorino sings after seeing his beloved Adina weep after drinking a love potion he has purchased, which is only cheap wine purchased from a travelling vendor. Nemorino takes Adina’s tears as a sign of her love for him and of the efficaciousness of the love potion. But, as Adam Harvey has noted, Allen deliberately begins this aria at the with the second verse, “Un solo istante i palpiti del suo bel cor sentir! [For a single instant I felt the beating of her beautiful heart!]” (Harvey 2007: 88). Like Nemorino, Chris feels the beating hearts of Nola and their child when he looks at the face of his newborn son. They remain present even in their absences, reminding him of the responsibility he refused. Every sweetness of egoistic enjoyment is now laced with bitterness and regret. The aria ends with the words “Si può morir d’amor [I could die of love].” Chris’s search for redemption from mediocrity and meaningless has failed.

Chloe’s father, Alec, proposes a toast to the new child, hoping that he will be “great,” but Tom interjects that he doesn’t care if he is great, he just hopes he’s “lucky.” The scene ends with the camera lingering on Chris’s face, full of guilt and despair. In this final scene, Allen distances himself from his ethical nihilism in Crimes and Misdemeanors. Chris is not Judah. He cannot rationalize or deny what he has done. He cannot sweep everything under the rug, and return to his life of wealth and privilege as if nothing has happened. His victims will not fade over time. The faces of Chloe and his son will remain icons of the faces of Nola and his unborn child. Even though he retreats into the prison of his ego, he cannot escape the face of the other.

Woody Allen’s cinematic exile has created a new space for his film art to develop a fresh perspective on our ethical relationships. This perspective is deeper and richer, yet still bears Allen’s signature of the tragic. When his recent films, such as Match Point, are examined through a Levinasian film analytic, the ethical texture and detail of Allen’s new perspective comes into relief. Allen is not creating ethics in his films. Rather, he is discovering and exploring the ethical structure of human relationships. Whether he will return to his nihilistic roots, lampooning conventional morality, and celebrating human neuroses, remains to be seen. What is clear is that Woody Allen has entered the most ethical period of his career. His exilic explorations of a difficult redemption serve as an ethical summons to his faithful audiences. He stands, as it were, across an inlet, beckoning to us to cross the infinite abyss between ourselves and others. His new films summon us to our own difficult redemption, which will require a love that is willing to embark upon a journey into an unknown land – an exile – where we will encounter the face of the other.

1 Both of these films are tragedies that wrestle with the painfulness of life, and the ever present threat of death. They involve desire exceeding its limits, and the difficult, and often ambiguous, pursuit of redemption.

2 To my knowledge, Girgus first made such a Levinas–Allen connection. See Girgus (2008).

3 Girgus explains the ethical significance of this scene by saying “in effect, Marcello resists the potential she offers of transcendence through a relationship with the other. He dismisses the ethical potential of the encounter to a failure to hear and understand. In fact, he really fails to see and believe. . . . In effect, Paola gestures to Marcello to have him accept a temporality that challenges his ordinary existence. She invites him to cross over the inlet, a symbolic act that suggests a new spiritual, transcendent view of life. Seeming to come from nowhere, like the fish, her presence introduces the other into the scene, challenging Marcello to create a new subjectivity. Her appearance means Marcello should move from a linear temporality of death to one of transcendence that recognizes her face as the face of humanity that touches infinity. It is time for Marcello to appreciate his own place in the world and his irreplaceable, irreducible responsibility in it to the other” (Girgus 2010: 12).

4 Levinas characterized exile as a modality of passivity, a type of ethical extroversion in which one arrives at an inwardness by becoming vulnerable to the other (Levinas 1981: 138). For Levinas, exile is a movement towards the other that does not involve a return. Levinas illustrates this ethical journey in his essay “The Trace of the Other” by opposing “the myth of Ulysses returning to Ithaca” and “the story of Abraham who leaves his fatherland forever for a yet unknown land . . .” (1986: 348).