Is it all over for Woody Allen?

He is a cinematic icon yet he can't even get a UK distribution deal. What's gone wrong for the New York film-maker? Geoffrey MacNab reports

Earlier this week, Woody Allen jetted into Venice for the world premiere of his new film, Anything Else, a romantic comedy starring Christina Ricci and Jason Biggs, as well as himself. The city has a special resonance for Allen. It was in Venice that he married Soon-Yi Previn in 1997. It was here he set part of his musical, Everyone Says I Love You, one of his most successful movies of the 1990s. Meanwhile, in Wild Man Blues, Barbara Kopple's documentary about him on tour with his jazz band, we get to see Allen lying back next to Soon-Yi in a gondola, being paddled down the Grand Canal and looking more like a character from a Henry James or Thomas Mann novel than a neurotic New York comedian. In 1996, when Venice's celebrated La Fenice opera house burnt down, Allen was among the first celebrities who volunteered to raise money for its rebuilding - a gesture that is not forgotten.

As Allen and his entourage descended on the Gritti Palace, his favourite hotel, the Biennale organisers fawned over him. "We're delighted to have him," the festival director Moritz De Hadeln told the media. The film-maker was similarly gushy: "I've never been to Venice at festival time and the city has been so generous and supportive to me and I love it so much that it will be a real honour [to be there]," he said before setting off for Italy.

Amid this mini-orgy of back scratching, it was easy to forget what was at stake for Allen in bringing Anything Else to Venice. He may be one of the acknowledged comic geniuses of post-war US cinema, but his career has suddenly started to stutter in alarming fashion. After the anti-climaxes of The Curse of the Jade Scorpion and Hollywood Ending, even the European critics and audiences who revere him and who've always stuck by him (whatever squalls he encountered in his private or professional lives back in the US) are beginning to ask if the master's powers are on the wane. The Brits, in particular, seem to be anxious about Allen. Well over a year after it was screened in Cannes, his last film Hollywood Ending (in which Allen stars as a blind movie director) is yet to find a UK distributor. Nor are there plans at this stage for Anything Else to be seen in Britain.

With Allen already preparing a new feature, as yet untitled but likely to star Robert Downey Jr, Winona Ryder and Chloe Sevigny, there is the alarming prospect for his British fans that three of his films might be left sitting on the shelf at once, all waiting for a UK release. "The problem is not with British distributors," one leading British critic suggests. "It's just that recent films don't feel very fresh. He likes to turn out a film a year, but the trouble is he has dried up."

What puzzles some observers is just why Allen remains so prolific. His reputation is secure. He has directed more than 30 features, many acknowledged as masterpieces. And this most private of men surely doesn't need the stress of going on the road to promote his movies or being obliged to play musical chairs with distributors. (After several films with Dreamworks, he's now thrown in his lot with Fox Searchlight).

Allen's quickfire approach is the antithesis to that of his idol, Ingmar Bergman, the arch-perfectionist who retired from directing features after Fanny and Alexander in 1982 and has spent a small eternity polishing his "comeback" film Saraband (a sequel to Scenes from a Marriage.) He has stated that his ambition is "to make one great film" to stand alongside Kurosawa's Rashomon and Renoir's Rules of the Game, but in recent years, that goal has seemed ever more elusive. After all, where does a 67-year-old man living a quiet, regulated and cloistered life, turn to for inspiration in the twilight years of his career? Allen can hardly be blamed if he has indeed been riffling through his bottom drawer, looking for old screenplays.

"He must be aware of it himself because of the reviews he has been getting," suggests the acquisition boss at the UK distributor Metrodome (and long-time Allen enthusiast) Ben Roberts. "But [if you're Allen] do you want to stop and have your career marked by a terminal slide or do you keep going until you produce your final masterpiece?" Roberts points out that even misfires like Hollywood Ending and Jade Scorpion still boast flickers of the old genius. "He just needs to take a few years off... His fans still like him - although his attachment to young women on screen is increasingly ludicrous."

In spite of rumours circulating on the web, Allen doesn't have a fling with Ricci in Anything Else. The film, warmly received at its press screening in Venice on Wednesday morning, is an amiable, well-crafted comedy that revisits ideas and even characters Allen explored in earlier work, while throwing in one or two twists. Biggs (of American Pie fame) plays Jerry Falk, a young comedy writer who falls in live with a temperamental would-be actress Amanda (Ricci). They move in together, but when their relationship begins to fray, he turns to a much older fellow writer David Dobel (Allen) for advice.

Free-spirited, keen on midnight jaunts to the Hamptons, Amanda has more than a hint of Annie Hall about her, while Jerry, in keeping with many other protagonists in the director's recent films (for instance, Kenneth Branagh in Celebrity) is like a younger version of Allen himself, complete with therapist, neuroses and an endless facility for one-liners. He wants to write a novel about love and death, but everyone tells him to "stick to the jokes - that's where the money is". The couple may be in their twenties, but they still listen to the jazz music Allen himself loves.

Allen's own character is an intriguing variation on the norm. Sixty years old, David Dobel is part Prospero, part nutcase. A high school teacher and would-be comedy writer, he is a gun-brandishing conspiracy theorist full of strange notions about the Nazis and anti-semitism in modern-day America. By the end of the film, after a violent confrontation with the state troopers, he is hiding out of sight in Central Park.

On a metaphorical level, that's what's happening to Allen in the film's marketing campaign. On the one hand, this is a typical Woody Allen vehicle. On the other, it's a romantic comedy showcasing two young stars presumed to be more bankable than he is. Revealingly, Allen has been all but airbrushed out of the Dreamworks posters and trailers. At a chaotic press conference, Allen responded to the charge that he was stuck in the same groove: "I am still small and still Jewish."Asked about his relationship with Ricci and Biggs, he justified his taciturn behaviour on set. "I don't talk a lot to them [the actors]. I know they're first-rate coming in and I try not to get in their way and ruin what about them has made them what they are."

To the confusion of many, he drew parallels between the actions of Dobel and that of the Israeli State. "He [Dobel] is a character whose heart is in the right place, but years of persecution have turned him into a paranoiac personality - what happened in Israel over the years was that it started off as a wonderful, wonderful country, but was then so badly persecuted - [that] finally it polarised the country. The country has gone into its shell and become aggressive in return. It's the same thing with Dobel."

Whatever their bafflement at its political subtext, international critics in Venice expressed relief that Anything Else was nowhere near as bad as advance word had suggested, but many also professed themselves vaguely unsatisfied by the film. "His method is basically to structure a film like a joke. Each scene is amusing because you watch it for the joke, but cumulatively it doesn't amount to much," said Variety critic Deborah Young. "The lack of structure of his most recent films has stopped them from being in the same category as his best work like Manhattan and Zelig. I don't know if he'll ever get back to that level."

Still, die-hard Allen enthusiasts are outraged at the suggestion that their hero's powers are diminishing. Thirty-four-year-old Brooklyn director and maths teacher Keith Black (whose 17-minute short film Get the Script to Woody Allen is also showing in Venice) believes that Allen's work remains as funny and touching as ever.

Black's film was inspired by his one fleeting encounter with Allen. Two years ago, he went to see the comedian play with his jazz band. "At the end of the set, he was walking out. I introduced myself and said, 'I have a present for you.' I handed him my script. He smiled, said 'Thank you', and kept walking."

Along with the script, Black enclosed a note explaining how much he admired Allen and proposing they meet for coffee. Although Allen has yet to call him back, Black insists that this brief encounter gave him the inspiration to complete his own film. "It's about a guy who thinks his life will change and his luck with women will change if he can get a script to Woody Allen," he explains. The moral of the story is that the hero can find a girlfriend even without getting his script to Woody Allen - as long as he learns to love himself.

Black doesn't know whether Allen has watched his short. Whatever the case, he is touchingly protective of his fellow New Yorker. "I think people are just being too critical of him," Black muses. "He can't please everybody... I still think he has a lot of great movies left in him."