THIS weekend, cinema aisles will resound to the cries of celebrating Woody Allen fans. I’m not quite sure how Allen fans celebrate — probably by treating themselves to a bumper session with their therapist or something — but his latest picture, Melinda and Melinda, is a cinematic sigh of relief for those who thought that New York’s favourite clarinet-playing neurotic had lost his touch.

Despite, or perhaps because of, the film’s setting in a more affluent and rarefied milieu than Allen has addressed of late (prepare for an onslaught of Park Avenue princesses, society dentists and high-stakes matchmaking), Allen seems more in tune with his twenty-to-thirtysomething Manhattanites than he has of late. While Jason Biggs’s role in Allen’s previous film Anything Else was basically that of a sixty-year-old jazz buff in a young man’s body, the characters in Melinda and Melinda seem to have taken on a life of their own. They are, for the most part, treacherous, libidinous, duplicitous and ambitious — and they’re tremendously entertaining for it.

The character closest to being cast in the traditional Allen persona’s mould is played by Will Ferrell, himself a distinctive enough comedy presence to play the role as something more than an apologetic Allen impersonation.

Both the Melindas of the title are played by the Australian actress Radha Mitchell, their tales unfolding in parallel as part of an ongoing debate between two playwrights about whether life is inherently comic or tragic.

Comedy Melinda is a ditzy blonde with a taste for pink cardigans. Her tragic incarnation is a more complicated creature, a self-medicating, self-fulfilling prophecy of doom with kohl-smudged ashtray eyes and a more than passing familiarity with the inside of a mental institution. She’s the friend in need who never stops needing, the one whose cries for help you guiltily stop answering after a while.

In reality, as in life, the division between comedy and tragedy is not so clear-cut, so tragic Melinda’s story has its share of laughs and comedy Melinda’s tale has touches of pathos. Allen pulls off with aplomb the task of juggling the two stories.

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