Woody Allen directs himself, Mariel Hemingway and Diane Keaton in this love letter to New York following a writer choosing between his underage lover and his friend’s intellectually challenging mistress, between working on a well paid TV show or writing his novel. 

God! The second scene of this is painful to watch currently. Woody on a date with his seventeen year old lover, moaning that an ex-wife is profiting from spreading salacious gossip about him and bemoaning an American media happy to perform witch hunts over people’s private lives. He’s like a little Cassandra, a curly haired self-fulfilling prophecy. Obviously biographical, the Mariel Hemingway plotline is problematic. She’s fantastic here by the way. And as much as she represents Woody’s unashamed desire to still sleep with teenagers… their relationship also represents safety, care and a lack of complications. Diane Keaton represents Woody’s reality as a forty something artist… the women he “should” date come with just as much baggage, neuroses, needs and history as he does. They are as flawed and as fickle as he is. It is either risk the difficulties of loving and losing a “real” woman or enjoy the simple yet unfulfilling benefits of sex and affection with someone pure, unjaded and unadulterated, by life. It is not the nubileness of his immature girlfriend that is the sole attraction, it is the fact he can impart in her his opinions, choose their movies and art exhibitions, knowing his taste and ideas will be absorbed rather than batted away or dismissed. Like the skyscrapers and diners and sidewalks so beautifully captured here in black and white by Gordon Willis, Hemingway’s Tracy is still naive enough to be romanticised. When Woody, in his opening narration, tries to create the perfect paragraph to summarise his love of his complex, ever evolving, harsh hometown he struggles. Returning to the eternal blank page is less daunting than committing to a life of potential rejection and the towering, long ago designed intricacy that adult partners hold.

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