“I’ve worked with hundreds of actresses, not one of them has ever complained about me; not a single complaint. I’ve employed women in the top capacity for years and we’ve always paid them the equal of men. I’ve done everything the MeToo movement would love to achieve.”
Allen has enjoyed a quite unique position in American film. He has had a prolific career making what are by definition "little" films (now known as "niche" films); character-driven comedies whose only distinction is their avoidance of virtually everything that would attract a larger audience. Allen knows his audience better than anyone, and they have rewarded him with an independence that very few filmmakers have ever enjoyed. This time, however, Allen is embroiled in a lawsuit against Amazon, who agreed to finance four new films written and directed by him. A Rainy Day in New York is the first of the four films to be released, but it may not be released in the U.S. because of Amazon's decision last year to back out of the agreement due to all the negative publicity around Allen. Undaunted, Allen has since completed production of his second film under the agreement, Rifkin's Festival, and is suing Amazon for $68 million, the amount of the original deal. (Try to imagine any other famous director delivering four films for just $68 million.)
Allen insists that it doesn't matter if his film isn't released in the U.S., that even if he is prevented from making films and writing plays and books, he would continue doing what he's been doing since he was sixteen - writing. Europeans have always welcomed his films, and A Rainy Day in New York is no exception. The French have been rather resistant to the MeToo movement, with some famous French actors announcing their opposition to it as yet another aspect of the politically correct American Revenge Culture, which recently condemned John Wayne for statements unearthed in a 1970s interview that were decidedly unWoke. But Allen is beginning to resemble that ultimate European exile from Hollywood, Roman Polanski, the man who defected twice - first from Communist Poland and the second time from capitalist America when faced with extended jail time after being found guilty of sexual misconduct with a 13-year-old girl. Polanski has managed to keep his career going for forty years without ever setting foot in the U.S. or any other European country that might arrest him and extradite him back to American justice. It doesn't seem to have seriously impaired his ability to attract audiences and win awards.
When I watched Polanski's The Ninth Gate twenty years ago I noticed the early scenes in the film that were set in Manhattan and wondered what subterfuges Polanski had to employ to incorporate in his film shots of New York City locations in which he can no longer set foot. Allen doesn't suffer from such a disadvantage, but the drift of public opinion is making it harder for him to persuade well known actors to appear in his films. Writing about A Rainy Day in New York in Le Monde, a French critic noticed a bitter note in the film's ending: “As if the director had a premonition that he was on the verge of being banned from a city that he might have filmed for the last time."
Rachel Donadio, the author of an article in The Atlantic about Allen's new film, wondered about how the French insist on a separation between the artist and his work: "there’s something cartoonish about how the French cultural establishment, or at least part of it, tends to celebrate art as if it were totally divorced from the artist."(1) Yesterday, The Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to Peter Handke - for his sometimes superb writing and not for his often appalling politics. The Swedish academy was clearly acting on their conviction that an artist and his work are separable. Writing about Robert Frost's treatment at the hands of one of his biographers, Clive James commented: "Luckily not even America—still a puritan culture in which an artist’s integrity must be sufficiently unblemished to impress Oprah Winfrey—has proved entirely devoid of critics and academics who can handle the proposition that the creator of perfect art might be a less than perfect person."(2)
The last Allen film I've seen was Wonder Wheel (2017). I thought it was pretty awful. Hearing Kate Winslet struggle valiantly with Allen's stilted dialogue underneath her coached Brooklyn accent was sometimes painful. The last of Allen's films that I remember with pleasure was Everyone Says I Love You (1996). That doesn't mean I wish that he hadn't made the twenty-four films he's made since. Every artist, even the greatest, if they live long enough, goes into decline. Ingmar Bergman, whom Allen has always revered, fell into a sharp decline after his last great flourish in the '60s (Persona, A Passion). Allen's nostalgia is understandable, but it's not for the '70s or '80s when his work was the most challenging. I still think his masterpiece is Zelig (1983). But that film was looking back to a time before Allen's birth, to the era of his favorite jazz music. A Rainy Day in New York will make its way in some form - probably online streaming - to America. The back and forth about Allen's alleged abuse of his adopted daughter, not to mention the new revelations of his possible, as yet unsubstantiated, ties to Jeffrey Epstein, will never be settled in court. So the only thing that matters is the number of people who haven't settled the case of Woody Allen in their own minds.
(1) "The Disparate Reactions to a New Woody Allen Film," The Atlantic, September 26, 2019.
(2) "The Sound of Sense," Prospect Magazine, January 23, 2014.
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