Comedian, writer, director, actor, and musician, Woody Allen is an icon for some and an epithet for others. His view of himself, the subject of most of this films, is often inseparable from New York, which you hear in his voice. You see it in his early films, where he's the kid who lives near the noisy elevated train that shakes his family's apartment, or near the Coney Island roller coaster, which turns out to be as overbearing as his mother.
Depending on how you count them, Allen has made around 40 films - most of them set in Manhattan, although the filmmaker was born Allen Stewart Konigsberg, in Brooklyn in 1935. For filmgoers all over the world who have watched those movies, Allen has been the quintessential New Yorker: anxious, sardonic and self-obsessed. Much of the New York that we see in his films is like so much of cinema - a fantasy. But for his fans - and most of them, according to box-office figures, are outside the United States - he is responsible for the New York that they think they know.
Yet Allen abandoned making films in New York five years ago, turning to England for Scoop, Match Point and Cassandra's Dream, and to Spain for Vicky Cristina Barcelona. If he left New York, you could also argue that New York left him. His films had fared poorly in his hometown, and with American audiences generally, and US investors had given up on financing them. Europe seems to have worked for Allen. His audience there has been loyal, to say the least. Vicky Cristina Barcelona has now earned more than US$93 million (Dh341m) in theatres, most of it outside the United States. Allen now has plans to shoot a film in France.
Yet Allen's latest, which opens the Tribeca Film Festival on Wednesday, is a return to his roots. Whatever Works, shot entirely in New York City, stars Larry David (Curb Your Enthusiasm) as an Allen surrogate, Boris Yellnikoff, a misanthropic physicist who flees Columbia University and teaches chess after a botched marriage and a failed suicide attempt. Boris reluctantly takes in a young runaway, Melody (Evan Rachel Wood). True to form for a Woody Allen film, this odd couple falls in love. Just as true to form, love brings problems, and things get wildly strange when Melody's family arrives from Mississippi to bring the young girl home.
On screen, the people and the city of New York witness the crazy drama, as they have throughout Allen's career. (David, like Allen, is Brooklyn-born, and his voice can't conceal that fact.) It's no surprise to have Allen back. For four decades, the city has been a character and a backdrop for Allen - and his nemesis. "You're like New York City," says Rob (Tony Roberts), a writer who has decamped for Hollywood in Annie Hall. "You're like this island, unto yourself. You're incapable of enjoying life."
The prototypes for New York as a character in Woody Allen's films are his two classics from the 1970s, Annie Hall (1977) and Manhattan (1979). In these, New York is not a place of architectural wonders and monuments, but a city of textures and atmosphere in places where ordinary people go, if you could call Allen's characters ordinary. Allen's characters are something different. They're people with lives, needs, conflicts, and neuroses, and they're usually part of a story, pushed and pulled by their surroundings.
Annie Hall tells the tale of a frustrated relationship between Alvy Singer (Allen) the New Yorker and Annie (Diane Keaton) of Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. The two meet on a tennis court on the waterfront, once a vibrant part of New York, but by then an abandoned and blighted wasteland. They spend an afternoon in Central Park, offering a typology of each New Yorker who is ill-fated enough to pass by. As the two grow closer, another scene has them discussing love with the Brooklyn Bridge and Manhattan Bridge in the distance, framing the scene.
No surprise, their relationship falters, and Alvy follows Annie around town obsessively. One afternoon, when she flees in a cab, Alvy pleads his case to the city, stopping people in the street at random and asking them for advice. "Love fades," an old lady tells him as she walks by. A police horse ignores him. The city that bred him doesn't save him. Nor will it save his character in Hannah and Her Sisters, Mickey Sachs, a hypochondriac who has convinced himself that he has a brain tumour: "You're in the middle of New York City. This is your town. You're surrounded by people, and traffic, and restaurants. You can't just ... vanish."
By the time Allen makes Manhattan (1979), he has refined the city's place in his palette, with an elegant overture of iconic New York scenes set to George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue. It looks more like the stirring end of a film than a beginning, breathtaking enough to make the wishful purple prose of Allen's character, the television writer Isaac Davis, sound good: "Chapter One - he was as tough and romantic as the city he loved. Behind his black-rimmed glasses was the coiled sexual power of a jungle cat ... New York was his town, and it always would be."
Unlike the madcap New York of Annie Hall, the New York of Manhattan can be a place of harmony, where music, landscape and emotions can come together - at those admittedly rare right moments - on a park bench past midnight, with the illuminated 59th Street Bridge silhouetted in the background. The nostalgic black and white tones add to the romance, and to the sadness of the story, as Isaac eventually learns in a luxuriant art-deco apartment lobby that his 18-year-old former girlfriend is heading to the airport for six months in London, the other world city that can equal New York.
Yet even Allen's characters can take their city for granted, and lose sight of its grandeur. In Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), an architect played by Sam Waterston steals two actresses from their catering jobs after a party to show them his favourite buildings. Like Allen, this character prefers the old to the modern, even though his profession is to design something new. Predictably, as with music, the new that replaces the old is a disappointment. Even the city he loves can't regenerate itself. Much of its modern architecture looks like the cold dystopia of his 1973 futurist spoof, Sleeper, minus the laughs.
Allen shows us what he likes best about New York when he is nostalgic, despite his insistence in Deconstructing Harry, that "tradition is the illusion of permanence". In Radio Days (1987), one of his most tender movies, Allen narrates a fictionalised family story, in which relatives share an overstuffed house in the early 1940s in Rockaway, an endless subway ride from Manhattan. Jokes about poverty and arguments about everything clatter through the crowded home, in an under-lit palette of worn browns and greys that seems borrowed from the painter Edward Hopper. The constant outlet is the radio, which infuses a fantasy of gentility with its talk of Manhattan theatre premieres and society nightclubs. The privileged characters, celebrating on rooftops, are hardly distinguishable from the bright lights of Broadway. The movie is an archaeology of high and low.
In retrospect, even those days of hardship and scarcity look good to Allen - in New York, at least. And the notion that life outside New York is unlivable, even in a paradise like California, is as persistent in his films as Allen's hypochondria. You see it as early as Sleeper. Allen's character, Miles Monroe, reborn in the future, is asked what it was like to have been dead for 200 years. His response is that it was like spending a weekend in Beverly Hills. And in Annie Hall, when Alvy is driving through the palm colonnades of Beverly Hills, Annie remarks how clean the place is. "They don't throw away their garbage," Alvy explains. "They make it into television shows."
Later in the film, when Annie rejects Alvy's pleas to come back to New York to live with him, Alvy manages to crash into two cars while backing out of a parking space. Just like the automobile, California brings out everything that's wrong with people. To make matters worse, the New Yorker can't convince a Los Angeles policeman not to arrest him. As for foreign travel, Allen's attitude is reflected in the title of his 1966 play (and a 1994 television movie) Don't Drink the Water, about an American family's misadventures in eastern Europe.
Yet if New York is a presence in so many of Woody Allen's movies, much of that New York is no longer standing. A case in point is the Beekman Theater, a movie house that once stood on Second Avenue and 66th Street. In the opening scene of Annie Hall, Allen walks towards the theatre with his professional partner, who chides his neurotic friend for his conspiratorial paranoia. Queuing for a film, Alvy endures a diatribe against his hero Ingmar Bergman by a man behind him. It's a classic Woody Allen moment. Yet the once-classic Beekman has been demolished to make way for a cancer centre. Good things will no doubt happen there when the building is finished - after all, Allen's character in Hannah and Her Sisters says that the most beautiful phrase in the English language is not "I love you", but "it's benign" - yet a part of Woody Allen's New York is gone. If Allen is satirising life in New York, he is also preserving its memory.
Allen lamented in a recent interview that by the opening date of Everyone Says I Love You (1996), each section of which begins with a shot of a different season in Central Park, five locations in the film were gone. The same fate befell the Pageant Book & Print Shop in which Michael Caine and Barbara Hershey begin an ill-fated relationship in Hannah and Her Sisters, and to shops on Columbus Avenue, the street down which Allen runs in vain to save his relationship in Manhattan.
Allen has also said that he is chagrined that a growing number of old cinemas in New York now house industrial-sized pharmacies, which must be a bewildering mixed blessing to a cinephile who is also a hypochondriac. As in so many of his films, Allen now finds himself in an odd dilemma. The city that fed his imagination (and placed him on the psychiatrist's couch) has pulled him back to become a dramatic battleground once again. Has he gone sentimental? Probably not. This is the man who once pointed at his watch and said: "This a family heirloom. My grandfather sold it to me on his deathbed."
New York is part of Woody Allen's family. Like it or not, he'll never be too far away.
