At the age of 86, the director has said that after a new film shot in Paris, he will never return behind the camera. It is the end of an era.
We should have known that Rifkin's Festival, his first film after the scandal that led Hollywood to isolate and condemn him, would be his testament and, indeed, we were right. After fifty films and one of the most prolific and acclaimed careers that cinema has ever contemplated, with an average of one film a year, all different and in the odour of awards, Woody Allen says enough is enough. That's right: after a new film set in Paris, shot entirely in French and of which we don't even know the title, Woody Allen will no longer return to direct films. He himself declared this to the Spanish daily La Vanguardia, explaining that he wanted to dedicate his last years of life to writing, ending his career with a film that the director himself defines as "exciting, dramatic, but also very sinister", very close to the atmospheres of Match Point, the film that in 2005 made critics realise that Woody Allen could decide to be someone else even when everyone was convinced that he would never have anything new in him.
To his great regret, it is now clear that Woody Allen can only find fertile ground for his art in Europe, the country that first recognised his genius, rushing en masse to the cinema to see films that grossed little or nothing in America, and that did not turn its back on him when the shadow of scandal came back down on him. With the outbreak of the #MeToo movement and the famous investigation by his stepson Ronan Farrow that unmasked and destroyed Harvey Weinstein's career, the gates of the pillory opened again for Woody Allen. Farrow's new media resonance has, in fact, led public opinion to return to the accusation that the court dismissed in the 1990s due to a lack of evidence that Woody Allen attempted a sexual approach with his stepdaughter Dylan: an accusation that has been repeatedly denied by the evidence and expert opinions despite the resistance of Mia Farrow, an actress who at the time shared a relationship with Allen and who, years later, has never stopped pointing the finger at him.
Since in America appearances count more than substance, Woody Allen was given the highest degree of disrespect that could be granted to an artist: his film A Rainy Day in New York was withdrawn by Amazon Studios, which had produced it, blocking it for some time before Woody Allen decided to sue the company for 68 million dollars. A dispute that managed to be settled out of court, but which did not, however, manage to stop the wave of indignation that led dozens of stars, from Timothée Chalamet, whom Allen directed in A Rainy Day in New York, to Kate Winslet, to distance themselves from a director who has written the history of cinema thanks to his style, his humour and his figure, which is closely linked to psychoanalysis and Judaism. It remains that, at the end of the day, Woody Allen has given in: although he had said at the initial press conference of Rifkin's Festival that he was not thinking of retiring, the director evidently thought it wiser to turn back at this point, not to mention the difficulties he continues to face in disseminating his works. Apropos of nothing, his extraordinary memoir published in Italy by Elisabetta Sgarbi's La nave di Teseo as well as Zero Gravity, his fifth collection of humorous pieces, struggled not a little to see the light of day in the United States: a truly unhappy fate for a genius whom, let us hope, Hollywood realises it has betrayed before it is too late.
Written by Michael Zippo
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