To Rome With Love, review 12A cert, 111 min Dir: Woody Allen; starring: Woody Allen, Alec Baldwin, Roberto Benigni, Penélope Cruz, Judy Davis, Jesse Eisenberg, Greta Gerwig, Ellen Page . Allen's vision of the Eternal City is about as authentic as a ham and pineapple pizza: every street is cobbled and garlanded with ivy, and his Italian characters have all the nuance and subtlety of the puppets from the Dolmio advert. His earlier European pictures, Vicky Cristina Barcelona and last year's Midnight in Paris, may have been equally touristic, but at least those films were about tourists: of the four storylines in To Rome with Love, two centre entirely on Italians and a third on long-term American residents of the city. In what is probably the film's least unsuccessful thread, we meet Jerry and Phyllis (Allen and Judy Davis), two neurotic Manhattanites who arrive in the Italian capital to meet their daughter's fiancé, a dashing Roman lawyer called Michelangelo (Flavio Parenti). Jerry, a retired opera director, overhears Michelangelo's father (played by the Genovese tenor Fabio Armiliato) singing in the shower and is bowled over by the power of his voice, but realises after a string of unsuccessful auditions that the man's talent vanishes outside of the bathroom. The solution, Jerry surmises, is to install a shower in the theatre: a very thin joke which in happier times might have just about passed for a punchline in one of Allen's short stories for the New Yorker. "You think this guy is a better singer than he really is," snaps Phyllis, as Jerry explains the wheeze. You're just doing this because you're afraid of retirement. The real-world resonance here can hardly be accidental: maybe even Allen himself knows this is subpar stuff. Elsewhere, an architect called John (Alec Baldwin) revisits the streets where he once lived as a student, where he meets nebbish twenty-something Jack (Jesse Eisenberg). Jack is in a relationship with a very serious young woman called Sally but starts to fall for her capricious, flirtatious friend Monica. These roles are taken by Ellen Page and Greta Gerwig, although inexplicably, Gerwig is the mousy bore and Page is the dusky seductress. In a dim retread of Allen's own 1972 film Play It Again, Sam, John stands on the sidelines offering advice. This all ends in tears, and the idiotic told-you-so look Baldwin shoots the camera may be the most annoying facial expression he has ever pulled. The third strand is a roaringly facile satire on instant fame, in which Roberto Benigni's office worker suddenly and unaccountably finds himself to be a celebrity. The fourth, which borrows heavily from a 1952 Fellini film called The White Sheik, is a truly dismal farce in which a young newlywed has to convince Penélope Cruz's call girl to pretend to be his wife after becoming separated from his real bride, who is later seduced by a fat, balding actor. We flit between these stories apparently at random, each cut bringing with it a fresh sigh of despair. As Allen enters his late 70s he shows little sign of slowing down, which is highly admirable. But there is no contradiction in admiring the man's work ethic while taking issue with the work itself, and this really is a galumphing dud.