Woody Allen, the headache no one wants
After reading Globe correspondent Natalia Winkelman’s warm and erudite review of Woody Allen’s latest movie, “Coup de Chance” (“Stroke of Luck”) a few weeks ago, I decided to go see it. Surprisingly, “Coup” was playing at only one local theater, in Arlington.
The New York Times reported that “Coup” had been booked into only 13 movie houses in the entire country. It seems like there was a time when a well-received Woody Allen movie would be playing in 13 theaters on Manhattan’s Upper West Side alone.
That was then, this is now. As Winkelman wrote, “The American movie industry essentially benched Allen in late 2017, after his daughter Dylan Farrow published a piece in the Los Angeles Times accusing Allen of molesting her as a child.”
The 2017 accusation was a restatement of charges made by the 7-year-old Dylan in 1992, which surfaced during the vitriolic breakup of Allen’s marriage with actress Mia Farrow. Law enforcement officials in Connecticut and New York state declined to press charges against Allen. The Connecticut state’s attorney said he had “probable cause” to arrest Allen but decided to spare the young child the trauma of appearing in court.
New York authorities called the original report “unfounded.” Dylan Farrow has repeated her accusations as an adult, and Allen has had his say. (“Of course, I did not molest Dylan.”)
Do your own research, as it is now fashionable to say. For brevity, I’ve left out some exculpatory facts, as well as many bitter insults thrown at Allen. In a 2017 article in The Paris Review about “monstrous men” (later turned into a book), author Claire Dederer dubbed Allen “the ur-monster” (arch monster) because of his marriage to Mia Farrow’s adopted daughter Soon-Yi Previn and because of Allen’s skeezy (my word, not hers) 1979 movie “Manhattan,” in which Woody plays a 42-year-old man dating a 17year-old high schooler.
Arch monster is a pretty powerful characterization when ghouls like Harvey Weinstein
and the post-”Access Hollywood” Donald Trump were roaming the earth.
Allen apparently remains radioactive in the United States. I reached out for comment to such elite theaters as the Coolidge Corner Theatre and Landmark Theatres, which owns the Kendall Square Cinema, and never heard back. I suspect discussing Woody Allen is one headache they just don’t need right now.
When “Coup” premiered in Venice last fall, demonstrators paraded outside the cinema, handing out leaflets that read “turn the spotlight off of rapists.” Inside the hall, the audience greeted the movie with a threeminute standing ovation. At a press conference, a horde of international journalists showered Allen with fulsome praise masquerading as questions.
I think Allen is a brilliant writer. “Coup de Chance” is at its heart a cutting, Stephen Sondheim-like comedy, not so gently mocking “the shallow worldly figures, the frivolous lives” of its characters, to quote a line from Sondheim’s “A Little Night Music.” It can’t be a coincidence that both Sondheim and Allen remade the same movie, Ingmar Bergman’s 1956 “Smiles of a Summer
Night.” Sondheim created “Night Music,” and Allen transformed Bergman’s work into his farcical 1982 sci-fi movie, “A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy,” starring Mia Farrow.
“Coup” is strikingly beautiful, for which Allen credits his cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, a three-time Oscar winner for “Reds,” “The Last Emperor,” and “Apocalypse Now.” “Vittorio always makes me look like a hero,” Allen said at the Venice press conference.
It’s darkly comical to see a talentless blur such as Timothée Chalamet garner free publicity for denouncing Allen, while the cinema giant Storaro instead denounced the Cannes film festival for snubbing “Coup” — a French production, in French, with French actors — for fear of “controversy.”
“I am scandalized and indignant that Cannes has chosen not to present his latest film, all because of the accusations made by his wife Mia Farrow, and her daughter Dylan,” Storaro said. “It’s a witch hunt that goes beyond the bounds of common sense.”
Catch the movie on the big screen, if you can. It’s also streaming on Amazon. There is an 88-year-old genius among us, and he won’t be here forever.
The audience greeted the movie with a threeminute standing ovation.