Criticism rages against Woody Allen's autobiography, "A Dangerously Unbalanced Pervert"

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Reading Woody Allen's memoirs, by the way, can cause a mental coronavirus . Or worse. It is the intellectual bubonic plague of the 21st century. When New York Times literary critic Dwight Garner announced to his wife and daughter that he was going to do it, "they looked at me dumbfounded, as if I had told them I was going to the last buffet still open and lick the" sneeze bars " That is, the transparent plastic screens that protect the food so that people do not throw germs, or saliva, or snot on them.

This was explained by Garner last Wednesday in the third paragraph of his book review. In the fourth, he announced that the article "is not a verdict on Allen's morality." But in the sixth the poor man had to state, before going into the subject, that "I think Allen's sexual relationship with Soon-Yi Previn, the adoptive daughter of his partner for many years, Mia Farrow, which began when Previn He was 21 years old, it was obviously an act of a pervert whose neurons are dangerously unbalanced. "

In the seventh paragraph, he entered the accusations - rejected after two investigations by the US police - that Allen had sexually abused another adopted daughter of Farrow when she was 7 years old. In the eighth, he once again warned the reader that the book had been written by Woody Allen, so "kill me or stick with me: we have a book to talk about." Then there were six paragraphs on, incredibly, About nothing , culminating with another 15 about the sexist comments that the director and actor dedicates to a series of women. In between, 71 words to remember that Allen married twice, had a long relationship with Diane Keaton, was friends with Mel Brooks and Norman Mailer, and plays in a jazz group.

Garner's attitude, though condescending as only the New York Times can be, is among the most educated toward the point of nothing. The Washington Post has been much more direct. Writer Monica Hesse has titled her review of the volume thinking, again, of the coronavirus: "If you have run out of toilet paper, Woody Allen's memoirs are also paper . " And Guardian columnist Catherine Bennett has called it "self-incriminating."

In all those cases, the criticism is the same: in his memoirs, Allen appears as a bad-tempered, self-centered and neurotic guy, and above all, unable to look at a beautiful young woman without mentally undressing her. Who could imagine such a thing from the director of titles like A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy , or Everything You Wanted To Know About Sex But Dare Not Ask , or phrases like "I've never seen you as a female of human type "( Bullets on Broadway )?

The book makes it clear, according to Garner, that Allen "is a man of the twentieth century in the twenty-first century." Which, again, considering that the filmmaker is 84 years old, reveals, more than anything else, that the Times critic knows how to count. Obviously, the filmmaker's treatment of women is inappropriate for the current era. Allen, who would have thought, is an old green who makes women into objects he refers to as "cannon blonde", "delicious appetizer", "luscious strawberry", "graceful lingerie model" or "poster girl central magazine ". One of his ex-wives "never found a mattress that he didn't like." Scarlett Johanson is "sexually radioactive". Christina Ricci, "completely desirable". Penelope Cruz is "a good and complicated actress" but, above all, "one of the sexiest beings on the face of the Earth and, pairing her with Scarlett elevates the erotic valence of each one to the cube".

To describe the relationship he had at the age of 42 with Stacey Nelkin, who was barely 17 at the time, he explains that "we went to work."

It's not clear if they're reviews or attacks, but those criticisms sidestep the fact that Allen's book is surprisingly linear for someone of his narrative talent. It is as if he had run out of ideas. The best moments are those of his childhood, when he relates how his life was in New York under his real name, Allan Stuart Konigsberg. A life of a socially well-adjusted child, none of the frustrated nerd that one would expect from his later work and often referred to in his films. Allen appears, in reality, as a fairly normal, almost even boring, guy with a very sixties mentality when it comes to flirting, and who, despite the pretentiousness of his films, insists that he does not have a particularly large culture. The rest is a relatively formulaic chronicle of his life, always with ingenuity - "Oviedo, a small city with a climate like that of London and charming" - but without much appeal.

That is a pity, because one would expect much more from someone who, apart from all his art and controversies, has managed to do more than anyone to integrate Jewish identity in the United States and, incidentally, in the West. With that alone, Allen would have had material to write one - another - masterpiece. Critics who focus on the filmmaker's relationship with women are with W., his partner in the short story "Selections from Allen's Notebooks," published in November 1973 in the weekly The New Yorker, with which the author he decides to break because "he does not understand what I am writing. The other night he declared that my Critique of Metaphysical Reality reminded him of the Airport".

In reality, the book and the reactions are a reflection of a tribalized society. Allen, a type of lefts whose existential nihilism scandalized conservatives, has seen how He was purposely praised by the National Review, the weekly founded in the 1960s by the ideologist of the Ronald Reagan revolution, Christopher Buckley and by the banner of the most rancid ancestry of British tories, the Daily Telegraph. Perhaps it is a sign of how the culture wars - a term that Buckley liked very much - have ended up devouring the legacy of one of his greatest warriors, Woody Allen, someone who made the most corrosive and iconoclastic humor a hallmark.

Paradoxically, it was the left - the side on which Allen was active - who ended up turning against him. Reading the reactions of the critics in relation to Nothing, it is impossible to remember the article that Woody Allen published on Friday, August 10, 1979 in the New York Times: "More than ever at any time in history, humanity is it is at a crossroads. Of the two paths to take, one leads to discouragement and utter despair and the other to total extinction. We pray to heaven for wisdom to choose the one that suits us best. "

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

• Woody Allen
• Penelope Cruz
• London
• U.S
• Brad Pitt
• movie theater

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