Dylan Farrow asks you to imagine something. Then, she asks: "Now, what's your favorite Woody Allen movie?"
This one, of course.
Somewhere between two and three and a half minutes, we get as close to honesty as you're likely to see in art. Now you know why he could write that scene.
5 comments:
I've never been able to make it even half way through a Woody Allen movie.
I don't know why. There is something about him (and his movies) that has always disturbed me.
I love his movies, so it's a real disappointment to have to believe this about him.
Lies in the home are almost the worst. Things have to be shockingly bad to get worse than that.
I don't love his movies or hate his movies, but I saw this particular movie more than twenty years ago. This scene struck me, at the time, as full of a kind of clarity and insight that I've rarely seen in art.
If I were a prosecutor, I'd show it to the jury as part of my closing statement.
If I were a storyteller, however, I'd tell a different kind of story. It would be a story about a man who longed to become famous as a moviemaker, and a deal he struck with a stranger he met along the way.
Of course he could have the power to make a film of tremendous clarity and insight into the nature of evil. All that was needed was the smallest sacrifice. Just a yielding, really, to something he wanted to do anyway. After all, he didn't believe all that stuff his father'd taught him, did he, that stuff about a God? Wasn't he clever enough to reject all that?
That's the story Chaucer would tell about it. About a bargain made, and a bargain kept.
Or a story of a slightly different exchange: all the power and greatness he had could be poured into his movies. He'd just have to balance that with a picture secreted away somewhere.
Eric Hines
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