Woody Allen

In the late 1990s, I had the opportunity to chat with Barbara Kopple , author of the documentary Wild Man Blues ., who followed in Allen’s footsteps during his tour with the orchestra with which he plays the clarinet, through various European countries. The director said that her goal was to spend a lot of time with the filmmaker, to capture what she was really like in private. She thought that the image of her as neurotic, witty and funny was just a pose, that she liked to cultivate in public, and that it didn’t necessarily correspond to reality. In front of the cameras, at first, Allen would continue behaving like in his movies, playing the role of himself, until he got bored, and then the real Allen would come out. Well, filmmaker Barbara Kopple’s conclusion was very simple: Woody Allen is always the same, just as we believe he is because of the image he gives of himself in his films.

Allen Stewart Konigsberg was born, as it is easy to guess, in his beloved New York, the city he has incessantly portrayed throughout his filmography, on December 1, 1935. As he himself does not stop remembering, he is the son of a Jewish couple , made up of the accountant Nettea and Martin Konigsberg. As Allen recounts in Radio Days , full of autobiographical elements like all his films, his father hid his true profession from him, for unknown reasons, unleashing his imagination (would he be a gangster or hitman), until he realized it was taxi driver, although he also worked as a waiter. As Woody himself recalls in Wild Man BluesHis parents were obsessed with him becoming a pharmacist, but he was an inveterate film buff, lover of comics and music who ended up enrolling in film production at New York University. However, he was such a poor student that he was suspended and he ended up dropping out, dedicating himself to writing gags for comedians. He ended up becoming a television writer, like his character in Manhattan . The first big step in his career was when he realized that by interpreting his own comic monologues, with his particular aspect, their grace was multiplied a thousandfold. He ended up sweeping various television programs and performances in venues. When he had become famous, he was hired by a film production company to writeWhat’s up, Pussycat? , in which he also appeared as a secondary. He then took on a rather unusual project: adapting a Japanese B-movie into English, reinventing the dialogue with a lot of humor. The result, What’s Up Tiger Lily? , was more successful than the Japanese original. After marrying Louisse Lasser, an actress who was involved in several of his first feature films, he made his directorial debut with Take the Money and Run , a hilarious pseudo-documentary that follows the criminal career of a petty thief, played by himself. It is a good sample of the first stage of his filmography, marked by comedies as funny as they are light, such as Bananas ,Everything you wanted to know about sex but were afraid to ask , The Sleepyhead and Boris Grushenko’s Last Night .

A second stage begins with Annie Hall , which was the great turning point in his career, as Allen began to make a more reflective, tragicomic, more profound type of cinema. He inaugurates one of the filmmaker’s favorite themes, the man who knows what he wants (in this case the ideal girl), who manages to get it and who finally ends up losing it on his own merits (also apply to Match Point ). The film was awarded two Oscars, for best director and best screenplay, which Allen did not go to pick up because he had to play the clarinet at a venue. In the same tragicomic vein is Manhattan , with unforgettable black and white photography by Gordon Willis , legendary operator of The Godfather ., who became one of Allen’s regular cinematographers along with Carlo Di Palma . At this time, Allen was paired with Diane Keaton , an actress in several of his films, including Interiors , his first drama and his first non-acting film directed by him. He would soon replace Diane with Mia Farrow , who worked with him for the first time in A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy , thus initiating a third stage, the most irregular, but also the most experimental. Allen dares to look for new formulas, like his hilarious fictional documentary Zelig , his masterful fantasy comedy The Purple Rose of Cairo, a tribute to the passion for cinephiles, an episodic film co-directed by Coppola and Scorsese, New York Stories , and he even shoots camera in hand, in Husbands and Wives . Curiously, there was already talk of the decline of the New York artist when he left Mia Farrow, causing great controversy in the press by pairing up with Soon-Yi Previn , the latter’s adoptive daughter.

Some thought that Woody was already old, showing signs of decadence with the disappointing Alice and Shadows and Fog , his homage to German Expressionism, which still had masterful moments. But despite the controversy over Soon-Yi, Woody Allen rose from the ashes, beginning a period of prime with the ingenious Manhattan Murder Mystery , one of his best films. Seniority is a degree, especially in the case of Allen, who throughout the 90s offered films as memorable as Bullets on Broadway or the musical Everybody Says I Love You . He started the new millennium on the right foot, directing The Curse of the Jade Scorpion., a particular humorous tribute to film noir, or the excellent A Made in Hollywood Finale, a priceless portrait of the world of cinema that you know so well. Allen left his beloved New York to go to London to shoot the memorable drama Match Point , although he also filmed in the British capital Scoop , a comedy with elements reminiscent of Manhattan Murder Mystery .