Woody Allen's "A Rainy Day in New York" was finally released in China, and it is hard to believe that the 48th feature film of the "old Wenqing" is actually his first film to enter the domestic theater.
But while New York is directly in the title, this is not Woody Allen's first New York-themed film.
Woody Allen once said he had "loved New York all his life," and perhaps no director knows New York better than he did when he was born and grew up in Slovak, where he still lives and works today. Many of his films are documenting the changes in this super-metropolis and the stories of the various New Yorkers who live in it.
Born in the Bronx, the northernmost part of New York, Woody Allen grew up in Brooklyn, and at the age of four, he followed his father to Manhattan, the heart of New York, where he fell in love for the first time. "Manhattan is unique, the most fascinating and spectacular city on the earth's surface." He once said.
Unlike Martin Scorsese, whose lens is full of crime, contradiction and darkness, Woody Allen's vision of New York is not as violent and crowded as most eyes, but is excessively elegant, romantic and beautiful, and even a little too beautiful, especially Manhattan.
Woody Allen has struggled for years to showcase the fashionable and artistic men and women here through his films—in "Husbands, Wives and Lovers," they discuss Camus and Turgenev in Central Park; in Manhattan, they look out over the Queens Bridge not far away from a bench by the river;
Manhattan
In "Anne Hall", she confesses affectionately in the night at Pier 11 on the East River; in "Anything Works", she chats with people at the Jewish pie shop of Jonah Shemmer; and in "A Rainy Day in New York", she spends time at the Metropolitan Museum...
"Anne Hall"
"Anything Goes"
"A Rainy Day in New York"
Manhattan opens with Woody Allen's "confession" to the city of New York: accompanied by American composer George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, the black-and-white widescreen kicks off the dream city of New York: the Brooklyn Bridge, the night view of Broadway, the Yankees Baseball Stadium, the scenery in front of the Upper West Side apartment, the crowded streets, and finally the fireworks blooming over Central Park. "'He's the embodiment of New York, strong, full of fantasy.'" Behind the black-rimmed glasses is his charm like a jungle leopard. 'Yes, I like it. New York is his city, a city that belongs to him. In the narration, Woody Allen borrows his own male protagonist to tell his complex feelings about the city.
And this complexity is reflected in Woody Allen's portrayal of the "New Yorkers" in the city. The protagonists of his films are always middle-class intellectuals. And when they put on the cloak of "New Yorker", they are also contaminated with the unique temperament that the city has given them.
They could be Ive Singh in Annie Hall, Waxman in Hollywood-style Ending, Harry in Deconstructing Love, Renada in Deep in My Heart... They were grumpy, sensitive, anxious, troubled by the capriciousness of their relationships, constantly mired in ethical conflicts and moral struggles; they were nihilists, talking about philosophers such as Diogenes, Nietzsche, and Kant, ready to mock society, politics, preachers, all statutes, even God.
Hollywood-Style Ending
But Woody Allen also sees that they are escaping: in Alice, for example, Alice even uses the herbs of Chinese doctors to find a solution to life's problems.
Woody Allen seems to be an opponent of the "American Dream", his films are always satirizing the absurdity of "fate is in their own hands", in his view, those "New Yorkers" who have left their homes to come to the bustling and cruel metropolis of New York, who eventually get saved or succeed from difficulties, rely more on luck than hard work - the good people in "Sin and Wrong" are blind, and the successful people who kill people can get away with it; the originally lifeless housewives in "Celebrity" become household celebrities. Also mainly by luck.
Celebrities
In short, this New York, which people love and hate, under the lens of Woody Allen, is both the inspiration "muse" of artists and seems to be the cage of the middle class.