I interviewed (which is not the same as saying: I met…) Woody Allen in New York, I think I remember it was for the promo of Whatever Works, a film released in 2009. By then, the director's personal and family scandal had quieted down considerably (unbeknownst to many, we are talking about events dating back to 1993…) but the actual explosion of the #MeToo movement was still to come. I warn that I will not talk here about either one or the other. I bring up the calendar only to draw attention to the fact that, when I interviewed him, Woody Allen was making the last films that they would allow him to produce and release in the United States. We had not yet reached the point where an exception like Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008) became the norm. Where Woody Allen became a kind of traveling comedian. An itinerant filmmaker.
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That interview went very well because Woody Allen is a headline-making machine, especially with European journalists. He knows how to handle and treat us. He quickly regretted for the umpteenth time not having stayed to live in Paris when he was young and made us smile, and even cluck like hens, when he expressed his complaints about how hard it is to live in New York. Not in the city but in the state, the 11th in the Union, better known as Empire State (yes, hence the Building…). New York City is at the southern tip of that state and certainly has nothing to do with the rest. Nor with the rest of the country.
"I would love for New York City to become independent from the rest of the state, to go its own way," Woody Allen stated with ease. It might have seemed like just another boutade but, thinking it over, I came to the conclusion that no, he said it in good faith and with all his heart. And that conclusion was followed by a suspicion as striking as it was exciting: What if Woody Allen was a bumpkin? A Manhattan hick?
Let me explain before they try to put a straitjacket on me: I lived six years in New York City. That's fewer than the years I've spent, at different times in my life, in Barcelona and Madrid, supposedly smaller cities in every sense. Well, here it goes: when I walk through Barcelona or Madrid, it's very rare, but extremely rare, for me to run into someone on the street if I don't want to. If I'm not making myself discoverable, that is. In New York, I swear I kept bumping into this person and that person and the other, running into acquaintances around every corner. The "oh, and what are you doing here..." index was only comparable to what I've experienced in my grandmother's village, the immortal town of Arbúcies, which in its moments of maximum demographic euphoria has reached 6,000 inhabitants...
In New York, I swear I kept bumping into this person and that person and the other, running into acquaintances around every cornerLittle by little I realized that Woody Allen's New York, the one that appears in all those films of his that we like so much (more to us than to those who live there,by the way…), the one we all traverse breathlessly as soon as we travel there, is much smaller than it seems. It occupies half of the Ensanche. It's more of an urbanization than a metropolis. As adorably neurotic and universally charismatic as you want, but it fits in the palm of your hand and the sole of your foot.
Little by little I realized that Woody Allen had gone from being a small-town boy in Coney Island, the Brooklyn neighborhood where he was born, to being a small-town boy from Park Avenue, always eating, drinking, and flirting in the same places, circling Central Park like a bespectacled hamster, totally ignoring the rest of the city. The rest of reality.
He has every right to live and make movies however and wherever he pleases (or is allowed to), of course… But little by little a suspicion took shape in my mind: what if that mysterious disdain of so many Americans for Woody Allen's films, which are a sensation in Europe, has a little to do with this… With the fact that many New Yorkers simply don't recognize themselves in that monolithic New York, always the same, always with and for the same people.
What if they feel the same way we did about Vicky Cristina Barcelona, which left most of us here perplexingly indifferent, and even with a bee in our bonnet, because it had nothing to do with anything we had expected Woody Allen to come up with in our city?, I wondered. What if Woody Allen works better when he sets the action in a place you don't know? What if the quintessential New Yorker is a disguised bumpkin, for whom Paris was truly too big… and Barcelona too?
What if Woody Allen works better when he sets the action in a place you don't know?All these ideas have returned to my head after watchingRifkin's Festival, Rifkin's Festival, the latest feat by Woody Allen, shot this time in Donostia, in San Sebastián. In the incomparable setting of the film festival. With wonderful views of La Concha beach, of the Peine de los Vientos, even with a beautiful popular market that later turns out to have been set upad hocfor the film…
Let me start by saying that I liked this film. It's not my favorite Woody Allen film, but, despite my reservations and criticisms ---which are not relevant here today---, it quite convinces me. And the thing is, I kept asking myself: if I were from San Sebastián, if I were a Donostiarra, would I like it more or less? Would it seem more or less real or like cardboard to me? And that's despite Donostia, San Sebastián, being a beautiful city but considerably smaller and less complex than Barcelona. Let's say it's much more on a "town" scale…On that secret "town" scale where perhaps Woody Allen's Manhattan operates without us ever realizing it…
What I was getting at: it is a joy and a source of pride for me that the production company that is currently helping to make it possible for Woody Allen's films to continue to be released worldwide is Catalan. Even if these are starting to resemble Tintin's adventures a bit. His film about Barcelona is one of the weakest he has made, in my opinion. Which perhaps still constitutes a paradoxical homage. A tacit recognition that Barcelona is a lot of Barcelona…especially for those who never leave Manhattan.