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.
I've never been able to make it even half way through a Woody Allen movie.
ReplyDeleteI 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.
ReplyDeleteLies 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.
ReplyDeleteIf 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.
ReplyDeleteOf 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.
ReplyDeleteEric Hines