Dianne Wiest once said of Woody Allen’s affinity with women, “There’s some kind of relish, some kind of cherishing. It’s complicated, really” (qtd. in Lahr 2006: 133). Allen’s comedian-centered films traditionally seem to appeal to men more than women, reinforcing an idea expressed by Steve Seidman that solo comedians tend to be misogynistic and consequently have a limited appeal to female audiences (Seidman 1981: 13). Yet, with respect to content, Allen likes to make films about women (a number of which are not comedies), and his “nebbish” persona might be seen as a critique of the idealized masculine images of patriarchy. He often tries to give voice to female desire, and his play with the medium, his film’s self-consciousness, might even evoke a feminist challenge to narrative conventions – what Claire Johnston (1976) called a “counter-cinema” created to defy the seamless illusions of classical Hollywood cinema. When Laura Mulvey writes about the difficulties women have “being articulate and putting emotion or thought into words,” she is herself attempting to be articulate about the cultural silence of women living in a world defined by male language. Her film, Riddles of the Sphinx, tries to deal with this silence and to explore ways of giving voice to female desire by fracturing language and breaking the conventions of narrative (Mulvey and Wollen 1979: 24). Her sphinx spoke with a “voice off,” not in the language of patriarchy, not in a “voiceover,” as Allen so often does, but in a voice that has been repressed by patriarchy and is not understood by men. Allen, obviously, cannot use such a voice. His narrators, even when female, such as Marion in Another Woman (1988), articulate his films from a male perspective, as will be discussed below. “It’s complicated, really,” because whatever their content, the center of Allen’s films, by his own admission, is always in some way himself – his moods, his fears, his fantasies, and his “escape into a life in the cinema” (Lax 2007: 366). In an interview in 1998, he said simply that, “the dividing line between life, my own life and art” is “indistinct” and “fine” (Ciment and Garbarz 2006: 171).

Inez Hedges has suggested that, “In films made by men, the strategy of presenting the world as an extension of a female personality is often used as a metaphor for the filmmaker’s artistic persona” (Hedges 1991: 90). In this light, the women in a female-centered film such as Interiors (1978) are “thinly veiled portraits of Allen himself” and Annie Hall (1977), whose title suggests its subject is Annie, is in fact about the creative process of the narrator, Alvy Singer, an Allen stand-in (Feldstein 1989: 80). Richard Schickel observes that Gina Rowlands in Another Woman (1988) is very much like the filmmaker: “She’s trying to lose herself in – in her case – intellectual activities” (Schickel 2003: 147). Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), while ostensibly about Hannah and her sisters, can be read as a film that explores men’s fear of sisterhood, a bond between women unavailable to men.

It is probably a truism of psychology that, in describing someone else, we can really only describe ourselves, and Allen should not be criticized for this. Given Allen’s complicated personality, his creativity allows for expression of unresolved conflicts, unfulfilled desires, and the need for continual growth and change. Because his primary genre is comedy, where nothing is sacred, he has been able to express these conflicts and desires from the perspectives of both men and women, commenting on and often ridiculing the socially constructed aspirations of his characters.

Critics are mixed as to how successful he has been in his portrayal of women. Richard Feldstein argues that Allen’s women become “specular icons in a circuit of desire” (1989: 69). Sam Girgus, on the other hand, is enthusiastic: “While some see only self-centered sexism in his work, one also can discern ‘sexts,’ a term used by Helene Cixous, the radical-feminist critic, to expound the need for revealing, regarding, and revolutionizing woman’s body, voice, and place” (Girgus 2002: 28). This chapter looks at Allen’s portrayal of women in five films over his career since Annie Hall in 1977: Manhattan (1979) with a male voiceover narration that, as in Annie Hall, deliberately sounds like Woody Allen himself; Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), the first film after Annie Hall that identifies its subject as women; Another Woman (1988), with a female voiceover; Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), again with a male voiceover, but this time more about women than about its dispassionate, uncritical, and anonymous narrator; and, finally, Whatever Works (2009), originally written in 1976–1977, again with a male narrator that sounds a lot like the filmmaker himself. While the men in these films change very little, the women struggle, not always successfully, to learn from their relationships and to grow as human beings.

Manhattan: Three Types of Women

Manhattan is about Allen’s character, Isaac Davis, a 42-year-old TV writer, and his relationships with three distinct female stereotypes: (1) the lesbian, Isaacs’s ex-wife, Jill (Meryl Streep) who has left him for another woman; (2) the insecure, heterosexual, pseudo-intellectual, Mary (Diane Keaton); and (3) the child/woman, 17-year-old Tracy (Mariel Hemingway). As the film opens, Isaac is in a seemingly inappropriate relationship (because of the age difference) with Tracy, whom he calls “the essence of art,” his ex-wife is writing a book about the failure of their marriage, and his married friend, Yale (Michael Murphy), is involved in an extramarital affair with Mary. Clearly, the focus is on dysfunctional relationships, but the point of view on them is male. Isaac, in his voiceover, says, “When it comes to relationships with women, I get the August Strindberg award.” Strindberg, who also influenced one of Allen’s filmmaking idols, Ingmar Bergman, is a writer with whom he has a close affinity, both in terms of questioning the existence of God and the regimentation of society, and whose troubled relationships with women have led critics to call him, like Allen, misogynistic. Tracy exists for Isaac on the surface. He gestures towards her as he comments that in a world full of ugliness and pain, God “can also make one of these,” a statement that denies Tracy’s human complexity and turns her into an object. He also calls her the “essence of art,” an idea reiterated at the end of the film when he muses on what makes life worth living and lists, among other people and things, Groucho Marx, Willie Mays, the second movement of the Jupiter Symphony, Swedish movies, “those incredible apples and pears by Cézanne, “the crabs at Sam Wo’s,” and “Tracy’s face.” He has broken up with her for Mary, but Mary and Yale have resumed their extramarital affair. Finding himself alone, he impulsively runs to Tracy’s apartment, only to find her in the lobby, ready to leave for London and the Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts, as he had earlier urged her to do. He asks her to stay, fearful that if she leaves she will change: “I just don’t want that thing I like about you to change.” The lines are significant – not just the reference to the inanimate idea of “thing” in connection with Tracy, but also change. As Allen’s films evolve, but even as early as this one, the importance of people changing in order to stay alive and to be creative will be crucial. Tracy will change, but the dark side of Manhattan is that there is no indication that this will be the case with Isaac or any of the other characters. Isaac’s entrenched male chauvinism, a characteristic Jill applies to him in her tell-all book, is apparent in that he does not offer to change his life and go with Tracy to London, which, because of his resignation from his job in TV production, he could easily have done.

Sam Girgus argues that the most interesting woman in this film is Mary. She follows a pattern established initially in Annie Hall, of a relatively uneducated, unsophisticated woman who has been tutored in the intellectual arts by a “superior” man. Mary, like Lee in Hannah and Her Sisters, has married her professor. She tells Isaac that Jeremiah “was brilliant” and “taught her everything,” but that she left him because she was “tired of submerging my identity in a brilliant man.” As writer and director, Allen undercuts the superficial idea of dazzling intellectual power by having the diminutive Wally Shawn plays the ex-husband, Jeremiah, and he uses Shawn similarly in Radio Days (1987) to emphasize that intellect and sexual power are not in surface appearance.

As a reflection of the late 1970s, Manhattan gives us a portrait of the uneasy situation facing women at the end of a period known as “second-wave feminism.” Yale’s wife, Emily (Anne Byrne), embodies a pre-feminist woman, caught in her domestic sphere, denying the infidelities of her husband, and wanting only to move to the suburbs and have children. Her more recent incarnation is probably the dissatisfied wife, Judy (Patricia Clarkson), in Vicky Cristina Barcelona, discussed below, who is too scared to leave her unfaithful husband and warns Vicky (Rebecca Hall) not to make the same mistakes she did. Mary, on the other hand, has tried to break away from the conventions of marriage. We learn from Yale that she has been “active in the feminist movement,” although we don’t see any evidence of this in the film itself, and Mary’s inability to live independent of a relationship with a man indicates a problematic connection to feminism. It has been suggested that a truly feminist film is about women who search for an independent existence beyond and outside of the discourse of the male. This is not the case in Allen’s films, in part because his women are often extensions of himself and are seen through male eyes. But many of his female characters do genuinely reflect the struggles of women to deal with the social changes of their era. Mary is a case in point. It is significant that she and Isaac begin their relationship at a party in support of the Equal Rights Amendment at which Bella Abzug is speaking (Figure 12.1).

Figure 12.1 Diane Keaton, as Mary, at the party in support of the Equal Rights Amendment, Manhattan.

(Producers: Robert Greenhut, Charles H. Joffe, Jack Rollins)

Abzug, an activist lawyer known for her hats, but more significantly, a strong supporter of the ERA, was, with Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan, one of the founders of the National Women’s Political Caucus. This establishes the film’s social, political, and sexual context as transitional for women, and Mary’s unstable identity is very much a product of this time. She denies that women should be judged on the basis of their appearance, yet she comes back to the importance of her own beauty over her intelligence when dealing with her insecurities. During the planetarium sequence, she tells Isaac: “Of course I’m gonna be all right. What do you think I’m gonna do, hang myself? I’m a beautiful woman, I’m – I’m young, I’m highly intelligent, I got everything going for me. The point . . . the point is – is that, uh, I don’t know. I’m all fucked up.” Yale’s attraction is to her appearance. “God, you’re so beautiful” he says during the seduction scene in Bloomingdale’s, an expression of possibly inappropriate lust that is also echoed at the beginning of Hannah and Her Sisters with its first title card, “God, she’s beautiful,” as Elliot’s voiceover expresses his desire for his wife’s sister: “She looks so sexy.” As a filmmaker, Allen’s perspective is an honest one about how men look at women. But in Manhattan he allows his women to struggle with their specular identity, giving Mary, as Girgus notes, “a voice and presence” that Diane Keaton’s character in Annie Hall lacks. He writes, “Mary emerges as an important character who embodies a serious dilemma in a world that still resists the social and personal challenge to construct serious alternatives for the independence of women” (Girgus 2002: 82).

Hannah and Her Sisters: Pregnant Women and Controlling Men

Allison and Curry sardonically remark that in Hannah and Her Sisters, “Allen gives birth to a plethora of women characters, but he cannot allow them to develop.”

He seemingly wants to create a world of women and to invigorate cinematic space with female action, but these women once again exist as mere backdrop for male action. The point-of-view shot keeps these women as “looked-at” figures, rather than as explored characters (Allison and Curry 1996: 127).

As noted above, the film begins with the point-of-view of Hannah’s husband, Elliot (Michael Caine) in both the voiceover and in his look at Hannah’s sister, Lee (Barbara Hershey). In the closing sequence, he again looks at Lee and says the same thing: “She looks very beautiful.” But this time, Lee has “fulfilled” herself by marrying her college professor, so Elliot adds, “Marriage agrees with you.” Lee has been a “looked at” character throughout the film and even a nude model for her older artist lover, Frederick (Max von Sydow). Lee is another of Allen’s “Pygmalion women,” educated by intellectually superior men (Figure 12.2).

Figure 12.2 Lee, one of Allen’s Pygmalion women, stands next to a nude painting of herself while Elliot looks at them both. Lee wants a “less complicated life.” Hannah and Her Sisters.

(Producers: Robert Greenhut, Charles H. Joffe, Jack Rollins, Gail Sicilia)

Before her college professor husband, her artist lover, Frederick, was her mentor: “I’m trying to complete an education I started on you five years ago. When you leave the nest, I just want you to be ready to face the world.” And Lee does leave the nest, telling him, just as Mary told Jeremiah in Manhattan, that she is “suffocating.” She feels inferior to Frederick – “You’re so superior to me in every way.” She wants “a less complicated life – a husband, a child before it’s too late.” Torn between the conventional expectations for a woman and a desire for something else (the dichotomy epitomized in the contrast between Vicky and Cristina in Allen’s 2008 film), Lee blurts out, “I don’t even know what I want” (recall Mary’s “I’m all fucked up”), and she leaves Frederick – not to establish her own identity, but for a passionate affair with Elliot.

Hannah and Her Sisters is not really about its title subjects, but about their relationships with men. The Woody Allen character, Mickey Sachs, seems tangential to the main narrative, but his episodes looking for the meaning of life are the funniest. The women, on the other hand, look for their meaning through their relationships and ultimately, perhaps, through having children. Hannah (Mia Farrow) says she has had a lot of “luck” (twins while married to Mickey through his best friend, Norman, played by Tony Roberts, as sperm donor), but she wants another baby with Elliot. Lee has already said she wants a child, and the third sister, Holly, married to Mickey at the end of the film, announces that she’s pregnant. But the final two-shot of Mickey and Holly is done through a reflection in a mirror. Does this suggest duplicity, two sides to this situation? Mickey echoes Elliot’s words about Lee at both the beginning and end of the film – “You look so beautiful” – emphasizing the specular identity of the woman. It is Mickey who narrates what has happened, in essence, telling the story of what we have just witnessed from his perspective. It is “topped” with Holly’s announcement of pregnancy, which should be a “warm and fuzzy” ending, but it was not the ending Woody Allen wanted. To Eric Lax he said, “Hannah and Her Sisters is a film I feel I screwed up very badly,” that the happy ending “was the part that killed me” (Lax 2007: 359). He told Richard Schickel:

I, myself, found the biggest weakness with a film like Hannah and Her Sisters was the ending of the picture. The original ending was supposed to be that Michael Caine has been in love with Hannah’s sister all the time, and Hannah’s sister gets tired of waiting around for him, and she marries some other guy. And he is despondent, but goes back to Hannah to live his life out with Hannah in a way that is a second choice, and he’ll always long for the sister, and see her at little family parties, but never be able to have a relationship with her again, and always stuck with his second choice for life.

That was my original ending. When I put that picture together, and that ending was as I just described it, it was such a downer. It was like the picture . . . just fell off the table.

And so I had to put a more upbeat ending on the picture, because I had not justified that level of a sort of Chekhovian sorrow (Schickel 2003: 139).

For Girgus, Allen intended this “structured and compact film” to be about women rather than himself (Girgus 2002: 118, 125). But it is the Allen character, Mickey, who has the authorial and structuring final words – and they are about a man who marries his first wife’s sister – while the opening of the film also is from a male point of view as Elliot looks at Lee. From the interview with Schickel, we know that Allen originally intended to end with Elliot, so even as the film exists now, the title character, Hannah, is largely absent and ineffectual. Allison and Curry may well be right that Hannah and Her Sisters is less about the women, who tend, as Laura Mulvey observed about women in Hollywood films, to react rather than act, than a film about “men trying to infiltrate a group of sisters” (Allison and Curry 1996: 129). Female bonding, the world that can only be articulated with what Mulvey described in Riddles of the Sphinx as “a voice-off,” remains a threat, and both Elliot and Mickey disrupt it. Although the women may get together and share experiences with each other as the men never do, even the self-conscious camerawork that slowly encircles them as they have lunch together calls attention to the controlling and disruptive male eye of the filmmaker.

The seemingly upbeat ending of Hannah and Her Sisters may not have been a part of Allen’s initial vision for the film, but he concedes to Richard Schickel that, “in general, you know, there is a modicum of hope someplace” (Schickel 2003: 139). And that hope seems to lie in people’s capacity to change. The character that changes the most in Manhattan is Tracy; in Hannah it is Holly. Even though both these films are structured around a male point of view, it is the two women who embody a positive perspective on the world.

Like her father, like Yale’s deluded wife, Emily, in Manhattan and like Judy and Vicky in Vicky Cristina Barcelona, she made some wrong choices. Allen says, “She made safe choices and cold choices, but never the right ones” (Björkman 1993: 195). Married for the first time to one of her professors (recall Mary in Manhattan and Lee in Hannah, women who are attracted to men who can seduce them intellectually), she has an abortion when she becomes pregnant rather than finding fulfillment in children like the women in Hannah and Her Sisters. For Marion, her career and “the life of the mind” take priority. Her older husband, Sam, who had wanted children, kills himself. Marion then marries Ken, a successful cardiologist, whom she describes as “cultured and honorable,” resembling Vicky’s fiancé, Doug, in Allen’s 2008 film. Neither is the type to make passionate love on the living room floor. Marion’s true love, Larry Lewis (Gene Hackman), whom she rejects for Ken, describes him, as Marion herself is described: “cold and stuffy.”

There is no question that, unlike Annie in Annie Hall or Hannah in Hannah and Her Sisters, Marion is the center of this film. This time, Allen’s familiar voiceover narrator is a woman who uses a mirror to muse reflectively:

If someone had asked me when I reached my fifties to assess my life, I would have said that I had achieved a decent virtual fulfillment both personally and professionally. Beyond that, I would say I don’t choose to delve. Not that I was afraid of uncovering some dark side of my character, but I always feel if something seems to be working, leave it alone.

By the end of the film “decent” personal and professional fulfillment will prove to be unfulfilling and she will uncover a dark and unspoken side to her character. Here, she anticipates Boris Yellnikoff (Larry David) who, in Whatever Works, is another unfulfilled professor who has failed in love.

She rents a small apartment apart from the home she shares with Ken in order to work without distraction on a new book. But the vent in the wall – that provided the original impetus for the film – proves to be a major distraction as she is able to overhear a psychiatrist with his patients. Some of what she hears is simply an excuse for gags, such as a man who has sexual fantasies of males while masturbating. The patient that compels her serious attention, however, is a suicidal pregnant girl played by Mia Farrow. The title, Another Woman, suggests there is “another” woman, but who this woman is remains ambiguous. She might be the Mia Farrow character. Allen told Björkman that “Mia was in some way an incarnation of (Marion’s) inner self” (Björkman 1993: 195). “Another woman” might simply be the woman with whom Marion discovers her husband is having an affair. Or the “other” woman may be another side to Marion, a side capable of feeling and passion that she discovers at the end of the film. The multiplicity is deliberate, set up by the fact that Marion is looking at herself in a mirror during that opening voiceover. Mia Farrow’s character, we learn only in the credits, is named “Hope.” Since she is a catalyst for Marion’s journey of self-discovery, it is hard to believe Allen when he says that it was a coincidence that “Hope” is also the name of the painting of a despairing pregnant woman by Gustav Klimt that Marion and Hope discuss in an antique store (Björkman 1993: 200).

Another Woman is about a woman learning to feel. The last line of Marion’s voiceover, after reading the novel by her rejected lover, Larry Lewis, is, “For the first time in a long time, I felt at peace.” A passage in the novel about Helinka, a character based on Marion, describes her life, her repressed passion for Larry, the man she should have married, and the wall she built up around her feelings:

Her kiss was full of desire, and I knew I couldn’t share that feeling with anyone else. And then a wall went up, and just as quickly I was screened out, but it was too late because I now knew that she was capable of intense passion, if she would one day allow herself to feel.

The film seems to end abruptly at this point, as Marion closes Larry’s novel. Maria del Mar Asensio Arostegui believes she has become “another woman,” independent, creative, with a true sense of self (Arostegui 2006: 266). But the abrupt ending may belie such a positive tone. Allen has described Marion as “maladjusted, unbalanced,” leading “an existence of a vast emptiness, very cold” (Ciment and Garbarz 2006: 176). This is close to how he once described life itself, as “a cold, empty void we live in and art won’t save you – only a little human warmth helps” (Lax 2007: 358). The affirmation that seems to bring Marion peace comes from a character’s passion in a novel. We don’t know that she has actually found “a little human warmth.” There have been several catalysts leading her in that direction. One involves her own memories and dreams, including one of her father (played by John Houseman) telling her that the woman with whom he shared his life, her mother, was not the woman he loved most deeply. Another is the discovery of her husband’s infidelity. Then there are the conversations she overhears between Hope and her psychiatrist, and her meeting with Hope. And, finally and perhaps ironically, there is her response not to an event in life itself, but to a novel. But is Marion capable of changing her life?

In one of her voiceovers, she recalls reading from her mother’s book of Rilke’s poetry, and tearing out the last line of “Torso of an Archaic Apollo,” with its famous injunction: “You must change your life.” It is a message that seems to resonate for the women in many of Allen’s films, much more than for the men. Allen has said to Stig Björkman that he is very fond of Rilke, and that, as a philosophical poet, “he was interested in some of the same existential things” (Björkman 1993: 198). Shortly after tearing out the Rilke line, Marion walks the streets of New York aimlessly, as Allen characters are wont to do, and ends up at her brother Paul’s office. She and Paul have been estranged, but she confesses to him, “I need something, but I don’t know what it is,” a remark that is very similar to what another unsettled woman, Cristina (Scarlett Johansson), tells Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem) when he asks her, in Vicky Cristina Barcelona, what she wants in life: “I don’t know, but I won’t settle until I find what I am looking for.”

In the next episode in Another Woman, Marion is at a restaurant with her husband and friends on their anniversary when a former student comes up to her to say that she was an inspiration for every woman in the philosophy department of her institution: “You changed my life.” We never hear how, but the importance of growing and changing, of avoiding structure, stasis, and sterility, are key concepts in Allen’s films beginning with Annie Hall (1977) all the way up to his recent Midnight in Paris (2011). Allison and Curry emphasize this idea when they write: “Woody Allen explores the terrain of relationship risks in order to extol the importance of risk and change” (1996: 122). We never learn explicitly what Marion needs (nor do we with Cristina), but Allen, like Rilke, uses women and art to reflect on human beings in general.. In a section of the Duino Elegies entitled “The Great Lovers,” Rilke writes that what speaks to him of humanity, “unconditionally, purely, inexhaustibly” is “THE WOMAN WHO LOVES” (Rilke 1939: 119). In Marion’s case, of course, it is the woman who fails to love. In Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Juan Antonio’s poet father won’t publish his poems because he hates the world, expressing his anger at the human race “because after one thousand years of civilization, they still haven’t learned to love.” Marion also has not learned to love. Like her academic father before her who shared his life with the wrong woman, she has been afraid to take risks. She overhears Hope describing her to the psychiatrist as a “lost” woman who leads a “cold cerebral life” and cannot allow herself to feel. The revelation about Marion has been a catalyst for Hope, too, in that she does not want to look up when she is Marion’s age and find that life is empty.

But what is it that fills a woman’s life, and is it different from what fills a man’s? For both, Allen seems to suggest, it is giving in to passion, taking risks, not being overscheduled, and loving art, literature, music, and poetry. But for women, their creative outlet also seems to involve motherhood. Marion regrets her abortion and now thinks, “maybe it would be nice to have a child.” In Hannah and Her Sisters, Holly gets pregnant. Although the prospect of fatherhood is also rewarding for Mickey, most of the men in Allen’s films, such as Larry, Isaac, and Alvy Singer, are creatively fulfilled by writing novels, plays, and movies. This would also seem to be the case with Gil (Owen Wilson), the successful but unsatisfied screenwriter in Allen’s Midnight in Paris (2011), a film that continues to explore familiar Allen themes and conflicts, such as the difference between stultifying and emancipating love. In this case, it is the man who changes, who takes risks, who grows. Recalling Allen’s award-winning short story, “The Kugelmas Episode,” Midnight in Paris fantastically brings its main character in touch with famous artistic figures from the Lost Generation of the 1920s. From these men and women, he learns about new creative possibilities in the present. At the end, unlike Vicky in the film discussed below, he rejects his bourgeois fiancée, takes up with a young French girl who shares his interest in art, and it is to be hoped will finally write the novel he has been dreaming of rather than the formulaic screenplays that have made him rich.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona: “Chronic Dissatisfaction”

Allen’s most interesting film to date about women is Vicky Cristina Barcelona, which encapsulates and expands on many of the ideas in the three movies previously discussed. Lighter in tone than Another Woman, it lacks the comic elements of Hannah and Her Sisters. Vicky and Cristina are the yin and yang of Allen’s women – the stable, repressed one, seeking security, and the adventurous, unsettled one, unafraid of her feelings and taking risks, but not knowing what she wants. This time, the male narrator is unidentified – an anonymous but all-knowing voice that functions as a factual storyteller, accepting of the quotidian routine that is reestablished in the characters’ lives at the end of the film. Over a split screen of the two women that emphasizes their differences, he tells us that what Cristina didn’t want was “what Vicky valued above all else.” Vicky is grounded and realistic, possessed of little tolerance for pain, similar to Marion Post before she succumbs to change through her encounter with the aptly named Hope.

Vicky is engaged to Doug (Chris Messina), who, like Marion’s second husband, Ken, is “decent,” “successful,” and believes in the abstract “beauty of commitment,” rather than making love on the living room floor. Basically, he is boring, discussing golf, houses in the suburbs, and finance. Tempted by intense, irrational sexual desire for the painter Juan Antonio, Vicky, again like Marion, represses her feeling by burying herself in work. Her superficiality is emphasized in that she is in Spain to complete an MA thesis on Catalonian identity, although she does not speak Spanish. Her best friend, Cristina, on the other hand, follows her instincts. When Juan Antonio, after a chance meeting in a restaurant, invites them both to fly to Oviedo to see his favorite sculpture and make love – “life is short, life is dull, this is a chance for something special” – Cristina blurts out she would love to go, while Vicky says the decision is impulsive. They go nonetheless, and when Cristina’s ulcer acts up and prevents her from making love with Juan Antonio, it is Vicky who experiences passion. After sharing the beauty of some Spanish guitar music, they kiss and slip from view at the bottom of the frame in a moment of fulfilled desire. It is an experience that transforms Vicky in a way she does not understand. She can only feel it, the “desire” and “intense passion” that Marion Post read about in Larry Lewis’s novel, and Vicky’s reaction is to repress it. Her fiancé comes to Barcelona, where they get married, but she is unhappy. At a Spanish language class, she is attracted to a fellow student, Ben (Pablo Schreiber). He knows she is married, but also that she is unhappy. They go to a movie whose title suggests Vicky’s inner struggles, Shadow of a Doubt, one of Allen’s favorite Hitchcock films (Björkman 1993: 194).

While in Barcelona, Vicky and Cristina stay with an older American couple, Judy (Patricia Clarkson) and Mark (Kevin Dunn), friends of Vicky’s parents, who seem settled and happy. Mark, in fact, would seem to be Vicky’s fiancé, Doug, in about 30 years. But when Vicky accidentally sees Judy kissing another man, her doubts about the life she has ahead of her are intensified. Judy confesses that she too is unhappy, her marriage is boring, but that her shrink has told her she is “too frightened” to do anything about it. Not wanting Vicky to make the same mistake, she tries to get her back together with Juan Antonio, but it doesn’t work out. In some ways, then, the ending of the film might seem to complicate Woody Allen’s usual affirmation of passion. Vicky announces to Juan Antonio and Maria Elena, “You people are crazy!” and conservatively settles for Doug and a carefully decorated house in Bedford Hills. She does not take risks; at 50, she may be Judy, if not Marion Post. But is security and stability better than “crazy?” The answer is not necessarily simple.

The matter-of-fact male narrator describes Cristina, who does take risks, as lacking direction, moving from relationship to relationship, accepting “suffering as a component of deep passion” and “resigned to putting her feelings at risk.” She has made a 12-minute film about why love is so hard to define, another Allen theme, but the filmmaker’s perspective on her is not unqualifiedly positive. In an interview he describes her character this way:

she knows what she doesn’t want, but doesn’t know what she wants, and probably will never know what she wants. And she kind of goes through life and has a relationship no matter what it is, and thinks, “This is the one that’s going to give me a sense of fulfillment.” And then over time it palls, because there’s a discomfort in her, there’s an anxiety inside her that she attaches to every relationship sooner or later, and thinks that it’s the relationship, when in fact the shortcoming is in her. And she’ll never really find exactly what she’s looking for (Tobias 2008).

The film is half over by the time she appears, but the moment that Juan Antonia brings the suicidal woman back to the house he and Cristina are now sharing, new life is breathed into the narrative. The fact that Maria Elena keeps trying to kill herself may indeed indicate chronic dissatisfaction on her part, but her suicidal tendencies, never fully explained, are not because of failed relationships. She is, rather, another one of those Allen characters – usually male, creative types, sometimes described as geniuses – who try to kill themselves because they cannot find meaning in life. In Hannah and Her Sisters, Mickey tries to kill himself when confronted with the truth of Tolstoy’s maxim, presented as an intertitle in the film: “The only absolute knowledge attainable by man is that life is meaningless.” He is rescued through his enjoyment of the Marx Brothers. In Another Woman, Marion’s first husband kills himself, apparently also confronted with Tolstoy’s thinking, while Hope, who threatens suicide, seems to be swayed from that course, although it is unspoken, through her encounter with Marion and a realization of the meaning of having a child. Suicide will be carried to an absurd point in Whatever Works, discussed below, but in Vicky Cristina Barcelona it is Maria Elena’s artistic energy that pushes her to moments of overwhelming despair as well as moments of overwhelming passion and beauty. She has been told she is a “genius.” Both Juan Antonio and his father express their love for her long before we ever meet her. Juan Antonio admits, as an artist, he stole her vision, and he quotes her: “only unfulfilled love can be romantic.” Maria Elena is initially repulsed by Cristina, but the repulsion turns to attraction, and she inspires the American girl not simply “to experiment” with photography, but to take it seriously, using an old-fashioned, light sensitive camera, rather than a cold, impersonal digital device (Figure 12.3).

Figure 12.3 Maria Elena and Cristina take beautiful pictures together, Vicky Cristina Barcelona.

(Producers: Charles H. Joffe, Javier Méndez, Jack Rollins, Letty Aronson, Stephen Tenenbaum, Gareth Wiley, Helen Robin)

They build a darkroom, take beautiful pictures together (mostly of Maria Elena as specular object), and they make love. Juan Antonio joins them, and for a brief period they are, like the English romantics, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Dorothy, “three persons and one soul.” Maria Elena calls Cristina the missing ingredient that makes things all right between her and Juan Antonio. Juan Antonio and Maria Elena feed off each other. They are volatile, violent, and need a third person – in this case, Cristina – to mediate their tempers. For art to flourish, there must be some stability. In his New Yorker review of the film, David Denby compared Maria Elena to the passionate Mexican artist, and wife of Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, but without the discipline to work (Denby 2008: 96). Cristina seems to supply a structure that allows for work, and all three function at a high level of art. But it is not sustainable. As Blake reminds us, reason and energy must be in conflict in order to have progression, and so one day, seemingly out of the blue, Cristina starts feeling restless and as she sits by the sea, her “thoughts begin to take precedence over feelings.” They are her own “shadow of a doubt,” and this is when Maria Elena tells her she has “chronic dissatisfaction.” She leaves for France – “I gotta get out of here for a few weeks and clear my head” – just as Allen’s angst-ridden urbanites walk the Manhattan streets to clear their heads.

Denby asks if Allen means for us to understand that the art that emerges from all this craziness is worth it and suggests that, “the answer Allen offers is a tentative yes” (2008: 96). In the struggle between security (Vicky) and passion (Cristina and Maria Elena), dependency (Vicky) and anarchic freedom (Cristina and Maria Elena), there may be no resolution, but the struggle itself can be fruitful, a source of creativity and art.

It may be that the only character in Vicky Cristina Barcelona who is portrayed as functioning somewhat successfully as both an artist and a human being is Juan Antonio; however, he works best only when Maria Elena is with him. His impulsive, free spirit is enormously attractive, but it does not lead to the change that is so important for Allen’s characters in order to grow. Graham Fuller also observes that feminists might well criticize the film and Juan Antonio for the ease with which he collects women: “He is clearly not Allen’s alter ego” because he seems to regard most women as malleable objects rather than self-determined subjects (Fuller 2009).

But with three passionate women costarring with the seductive Juan Antonio, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, unlike the other Allen films discussed so far, suggests that women share an equality with men and that they too are capable of being frustrated and erotically disappointed. However, at the end, none of the characters has followed Rilke’s dictum about changing your life. They are essentially at the same point they were at the beginning. Juan Antonio and Maria Elena are again at each other’s throats, and there is every reason to believe she will leave him once more: romantic love forever unfulfilled. Cristina is still lost, and, as discussed above, Vicky has capitulated to convention, although it’s possible in her confrontation with mortality (Maria Elena inadvertently shoots her in the hand), she has discovered something significant about herself and life. But this is never articulated. Of the five films discussed here, this one – full of color, energy, beautiful people, and the pictorial majesty of parts of Spain – is the only one that essentially ends as it began, coming full circle with its characters still stuck in the routines that have defined lives. Compared to Manhattan, Hannah and Her Sisters, and Another Woman, Vicky Cristina Barcelona does not offer its women a path to growth. Jill, Mary, and Tracy are all in slightly different places at the end of Manhattan than they were at the beginning. This is also true of Hannah and her sisters and Marion in Another Woman. The emotional entanglements we have witnessed in these three films, painfully human and frustrating, still yield some sense that life is more than a repetitive pattern of hope and disillusionment. Not so in Vicky Cristina Barcelona. No doubt this is why Allen has said “it’s a very pessimistic picture, and sad” (Tobias 2008).

Whatever Works: It’s a Matter of Luck

Although originally written in 1976–1977 for Zero Mostel, who died in 1977, and rehashing a number of familiar Allen themes, Whatever Works (2009) does allow one of its female characters a dramatic and delightful change. Melody St. Ann Celestine’s mother, Marietta, played by Patricia Clarkson, goes from an alcoholic, faded Southern belle who thinks she has found salvation in Jesus, to a sexually liberated free spirit, a Maria Elena without suicidal tendencies, whose “arty” and very nearly pornographic photographs take New York by storm. Juxtaposed with Vicky Cristina Barcelona, the Marietta character is particularly interesting because it was Patricia Clarkson who played the trapped, repressed Judy in that film, the woman who was too scared to break free of the boring, conventional life offered by her husband. In Whatever Works, a playful film all about risk and change, she breaks free.

We begin with a pattern established in Annie Hall, where the Woody Allen surrogate, in this case, Boris Yellnikoff, moves in and out of the diegesis, sometimes part of the narrative, sometimes speaking directly to the audience, explaining his beliefs – “it’s a fallacious notion that people are decent” – explaining himself – “I’m not a likeable guy” – and telling us about his life before the point at which the film begins. Like so many other Allen characters, he has tried to commit suicide when his first marriage failed. He’s a genius; his wife, Jessica, was also brilliant, and two brilliant intellectuals are clearly not compatible, any more than Juan Antonio and Maria Elena are compatible. Successful relationships, both onscreen and off for Allen, seem to involve people who are different. Like Marion Post, Boris is dissatisfied with his life as a professor and he has quit his job at Columbia and now supports himself teaching chess to children. This allows him to continue to have nothing but contempt for his students, and to learn nothing new about chess. He has no desire to have another relationship with a woman and believes that love does not conquer all and does not last.

We pick up a pattern established in Manhattan, the attraction between a younger girl and an older man when Boris meets Melody (Evan Rachel Wood), a homeless runaway from Mississippi who stops Boris on the street to ask for food and ends up going home with him and staying. With Melody we repeat the familiar Pygmalion routine where an older, wiser man tutors a young innocent in the ways of the world, the mind, and the body. Melody, whom Boris calls a “brainless twit” and a “sublimated baton twirler,” gradually absorbs his ideas and convinces him to marry her. Boris becomes less inclined to kill himself now that he is in a comfortable relationship with a young woman who is cheerful, undemanding, and who waits on him hand and foot. It is Tracy and Isaac all over again, although Tracy, who goes to Dalton, a fashionable private school in New York, is probably more of an artistic, intellectual type than the mindless Melody, who never disproves Boris’s estimation of her brainpower.

The first half of Whatever Works moves along in familiar Allen fashion until Melody’s dysfunctional parents enter the story. Just as Vicky Cristina Barcelona is energized when Maria Elena appears, this one too comes to life when Melody’s mother, Marietta, shows up unannounced at the apartment her daughter shares with Boris. Melody’s father (played by Ed Begley, Jr.) enters later. His resurrection from a National Rifle Association-loving Southern bigot to a man who discovers he is really gay allows Allen to play with and critique socially expected norms, but Marietta is less of a caricature and more interesting. In this film, Allen gives us an older woman who embodies risk, change, artistic expression, and just plain fun. Like Cristina in Allen’s previous film, Marietta discovers she is good at photography. She is encouraged by Boris’s friend, Leo Brockman (Conleth Hill), a philosophy professor like Marion Post, and with her creative energies unleashed, she is transformed from a pitiful Blanche Dubois to a colorful hippie descendant of the Woodstock counterculture of peace and love. She moves in with Leo and another of Boris’s friends, Morgenstern (Olek Krupa) and the three enjoy a happy sexual ménage à trois. Her photographs of nude men are exhibited in a prominent New York gallery to great acclaim. Marietta, at the end of Allen’s film, is a truly happy and fulfilled woman, or, perhaps, a parody of one.

However, if the upbeat ending of Hannah and Her Sisters did not please Allen, he surely would be even less pleased with Whatever Works, unless we look at the ending as a deliberate parody of the happy endings of different forms of comedy. Hannah was not a parody, but Whatever Works is more in line with Allen’s comic roots and the earlier parodies of the 1970s, which is when this script was originally written. In the main love story, Melody finally leaves Boris for a man more appropriate to her age, who defines himself as a “romantic” and who believes in love at first sight. It is the conventional, too-perfect pairing at the conclusion of romantic or screwball comedies where the heroine starts out with the wrong man but is united with the right one at the end. Melody tells Boris, “I’ve grown because of you,” but this does not help the existentially empty Boris, who attempts suicide again. This time, he lands on a psychic walking her dog who turns out to be the “totally right person” for him, the deus ex machina generating the too-perfect ending of a slapstick comedy. In a more modern twist, Melody’s father John finds happiness with his new partner, Howard (Christopher Evan Welch), and the liberated Marietta has two lovers: “Whatever works.” Life is a matter of “luck,” Whatever Works insists, a theme Allen has reiterated many times. In his interview with Richard Schickel, he said, “I feel that luck is the chief component in a good relationship between a man and a woman” (Schickel 2003: 131). Luck determines all the relationships in Whatever Works, but the two characters who are allowed the most screen time to develop and change are Melody and Marietta, in part because Boris can’t even conceive of the possibility of change, growth, transformation, since he’s never experienced either.

Conclusion: “It’s Complicated”

The fact that the majority of scholars writing on Woody Allen are men (more than half the contributors to this volume), would seem to indicate that his films do offer men more than women an engaging perspective of the trials and tribulations of living. But current theories of spectatorship emphasize that one of the great pleasures of watching films is that they allow spectators to identify with a range of subject positions. Allen, in fact, illustrates this gender-flexible identification by showing both a male (see Play It Again, Sam) and a female (Purple Rose of Cairo) totally absorbed in and obsessed by the films they are watching.

In looking over the selection of Allen’s work covered in this chapter, it is clear that Dianne Wiest is right: his affinity with women is “complicated.” In terms of content, he likes to make films about women, and he does attempt to give voice to female desire. But more often, women serve as surrogates for himself, his desires, his needs, his fears, reaffirming the idea that we all have a good deal more gender flexibility within us than is often acknowledged. This is reflected in both the content of his films and in how they are received.

Allen would not call himself a feminist, but it is undeniable that he often explores issues with which women struggle in late twentieth and early twenty-first-century America, and, more often than not, it is the women who take risks, who grow and change, rather than the men. Neither Boris in Whatever Works nor Juan Antonio in Vicky Christina Barcelona changes significantly in their films. Maria Elena astutely observes that Juan Antonio will never realize his potential without her, but he cannot live with her. Boris attempts suicide again at the end of Whatever Works, lands on the woman who is now “totally the right person” for him, but there is no reason for us to believe it. He is the same misanthrope he was before who, right from the beginning of the film, told us, “I’m not a likeable guy.” In their essential stasis, Boris and Juan Antonio carry on a pattern we saw in Isaac and Mickey. Whereas Laura Mulvey once described women in film as passive and men as active, the reverse tends to be true for characters in Allen films (Mulvey 1989: 20). And, like his male characters, Allen denies that his basic outlook on the human condition has changed greatly over the years. He still doesn’t believe in the existence of God and, as he said in “My Speech to the Graduates”: “We have never learned to love. We lack leaders and coherent programs. We have no spiritual center. We are adrift alone in the cosmos wreaking monstrous violence on one another out of frustration and pain” (1980: 61). But with Annie Hall in 1977, after he met Diane Keaton, he did begin dealing with this existential angst and darkness from a woman’s point of view. “It became fun for me to write from the female point of view. I had never done it before, so it was fresh. It also didn’t carry with it the burden of a central comic persona that had to see everything the way a wit sees everything” (Lahr 2006: 156). He was able to get away from Seidman’s misogynistic comedian-centered comedy and, indeed, to laugh at it. This would seem to be what he is doing with Boris, where the upbeat ending of Whatever Works can be seen as a parodic version of “happily ever after.”

Both the men and women in Allen’s films embody sides of himself ranging from the victim to the creative artist. But there is no easy dichotomy to his characters, or to his outlook on how to live life. We have men who talk and write about life, like Isaac and Alvy, but do not live it, and women who live it, like Maria Elena and Cristina, but cannot find a stable relationship. By definition, the artist seems to be the more complicated and miserable character. Lee’s reclusive artist/lover, Frederick, in Hannah and Her Sisters, watches shows about the Holocaust on television and tells her that she is his “only connection to the world.” Like the dispassionate professor, Marion, in Another Woman, or Paul (Michael Sheen), the pedantic professor in Midnight in Paris [who is, however, apparently a good dancer], the artist as well as the academic can lead a cold, cerebral life and needs someone to inspire desire and feeling. On the other hand, the fully passionate life, such as Maria Elena’s, can lead to the same frustrations that drive Mickey and Boris and company to attempt suicide. Ideally, there must be some kind of balance between reason and energy for both art and human relationships to evolve productively. Blake wrote in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence.” In Allen’s films, men seem to turn to forms of art and women to relationships, but, for both, it is crucial to maintain the capacity to take risks and be open to change and not to let one contrary overcome the other. The women may be more successful in this area than the men, Gil Pender excepted – Tracy off to London, Holly writing and pregnant, Marion on the verge of “hope,” Cristina on her unfulfilled quest, and the wonderful Marietta cavorting sexually and artistically in New York City.

In Hannah and Her Sisters, the quotation from Tolstoy, “The only absolute knowledge attainable by man is that life is meaningless” is juxtaposed with a cut to a statue of Rodin’s “The Thinker,” suggesting that the artist strives, but often comes up empty. And in relationships, it may be that “only unfulfilled love can be romantic,” to quote from Vicky Cristina Barcelona. If human beings inevitably face emptiness and the loss of love, then “the only absolute knowledge” may be our ability to laugh at our dreams and failures, and Allen’s brilliance at parody allows us this gift. Although his subjects are invariably white, “middle class” – depending on how that term is defined – and usually educated and urban, as he has matured, Allen has given us more complex characters, with a greater variety in terms of gender, age, and sexual identity. Perhaps this simply reflects the maturing of the artist, and an acceptance of the fact that life is full of irresolvable contradictions that are fun to explore. He once told John Lahr that, “if you write something from the heart, it’s full of truths that you never had to cerebrally impose on it” (Lahr 2006: 156). And those felt truths are “complicated.”

Works Cited

Allen, Woody (1980) Side Effects. New York: Random House.

Allison, Terry L. and Renée R. Curry (1996) “Frame breaking and code breaking on Woody Allen’s relationship films.” In Renée R. Curry (ed.), Perspectives on Woody Allen. New York: G.K. Hall, 121–136.

Arostegui, Maria del Mar Asensio (2006) “Hlenka regained: Irony and ambiguity in the narrator of Woody Allen’s Another Woman.” In Charles L.P. Silet (ed.), The Films of Woody Allen: Critical Essays. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 256–267.

Björkman, Stig (1993) Woody Allen on Woody Allen. New York: Grove Press.

Ciment, Michel and Frank Garbarz (2006) “Woody Allen: ‘All my films have a connection with magic.’ ” In Robert E. Kapsis and Kathie Coblentz (eds.), Woody Allen Interviews. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 169–178.

Denby, David (2008) “Young loves.” The New Yorker (Aug. 11), 96.

Feldstein, Richard (1989) “Displaced feminine representation in Woody Allen’s cinema.” In Marleen S. Barr and Richard Feldstein (eds.), Discontented Discourses: Feminism/Textual Intervention/Psychoanalysis. Urbana, IL: Illinois University Press, 69–86.

Fuller, Graham (2009) “No city for old men.” Sight and Sound 19.2 (Feb.).

Girgus, Sam (2002) The Films of Woody Allen, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hedges, Inez (1991) Breaking the Frame. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Johnston, Claire (1976) “Women’s cinema as counter-cinema.” In Bill Nichols (ed.), Movies and Methods. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Lahr, John (2006) “The imperfectionist.” In Robert E. Kapsis and Kathie Coblentz (eds.), Woody Allen Interviews. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 143–168.

Lax, Eric (2007) Conversations with Woody Allen: His Films, the Movies, and Moviemaking. New York: Knopf.

Mulvey, Laura (1989) Visual and Other Pleasures. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Mulvey, Laura and Peter Wollen (1979) “Interview.” Millennium Film Journal 4.5, 24.

Rilke, Rainer Maria (1939) Duino Elegies. Trans. J. B. Leishman and Stephen Spender. New York: W.W. Norton.

Schickel, Richard (2003) Woody Allen: A Life in Film. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee.

Seidman, Steve (1981) Comedian Comedy: A Tradition in Hollywood Film. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press.

Tobias, Scott (2008) “Woody Allen: Interview.” A.V. Club (Aug. 13). www.avclub.com/articles/woody-allen,14292/ (accessed Oct. 1, 2012).

Manhattan: Three Types of Women

Hannah and Her Sisters: Pregnant Women and Controlling Men

Another Woman: “You Must Change Your Life”

Vicky Cristina Barcelona: “Chronic Dissatisfaction”

Whatever Works: It’s a Matter of Luck

Conclusion: “It’s Complicated”