Mia Farrow is still acting.
In part 1 of HBO’s new documentation, “Allen v. Farrow”, the actress, looking as affected and tense as the state of Connecticut, recounts, once again, how she was emotionally mutilated by filmmaker Woody Allen, who abandoned her for a adult daughter and then, she claims, started harassing her other prepubertal girl.
It is a fascinating but strangely antiseptic performance by an actress who has done her life’s work demanding revenge on the man who did her harm.
The problem is that it seems to me that not a word of this, with the possible exceptions of “e” and “but”, is true.
And, once again, Mia’s fantasy of scorched earth revenge made an innocent victim – her daughter, Dylan, who would have been brutalized by Woody when she was 7. As she has been doing for decades, Mia is exploiting Dylan, now 35, mentally maiming her, throwing her under the Woody bus in a twisted effort to destroy her ex-lover’s life, reputation and career.
Why did the filmmakers encourage her so cynically? Perhaps because this hideousness is a better story than the one that actually happened.
While watching Part 1, released on Sunday, it is useful to compare Mia’s current story about betrayal and endless dinners in busy restaurants with the one she witnessed in a New York court in 1993 when Woody sued her for custody of the three children they share.
A crucial point in the episode occurs when Mia reports the discovery of Polaroid photos of her daughter Soon-Yi Previn in Woody’s apartment, across from Central Park. In the photos, Soon-Yi is naked.
According to Mia’s revisionist story about the event, Soon-Yi, now 50, is not only in fashion, but also on the subject of heavy “pornography” – straight out of “Hustler”.
The discovery of the kinky fur treasure prompted Mia to run back to her apartment, shivering, she now says, to face her daughter.
“Soon-Yi was at home and I remember saying it. ‘I found the photos,’ ”recalls Farrow“ suddenly ”. “And she said, ‘What pictures?’ And I said, ‘The photos that Woody took.’ And she started to cry and I started to cry and I thought, ‘No, no, it’s not your fault.’ And she was beside herself. “
Candy.
And apparently fake.
When Mia, now 76, testified in court about 28 years ago, no one was crying. Instead, Mia testified, after confronting Soon-Yi about the merely “nude” photos, her daughter scoffed at her mother.
“The person who is sleeping with [Woody] it’s the one with the relationship, ” Mia bitterly recalled saying Soon-Yi. And then, Mia admitted in the statement that she punched and punched the young woman.
“I’m not proud,” Mia testified coldly.
In addition to this ugly – but honest – display of anger, I saw a display in the courtroom that made me question Mia’s sanity. It was a photograph of Mia with her gigantic litter of biological and adopted children. Mia drove metal stakes into each person’s chest to show Woody how her actions with Soon-Yi had broken their hearts.
There were other televised deviations from the story she had told.
Mia says in the documentary that a therapist, around 1990, thought that Woody acted “inappropriately”, but not sexually, towards Dylan around 1990, when Mia was still with him. She mentions this to explain why she stayed with Woody and had a child with him.
But the likely truth is much simpler – that no child sexual abuse has occurred. No, as Mia said, at her Connecticut home. Nowhere. (Woody vehemently denies that it happened.)
Mia gained primary custody of the children, but it was never proven that she was entirely right.
The fact is that, no matter how much Mia and her supporters want the abuse to be true, New York state officials said they could not prove the charges and Connecticut’s child abuse experts concluded that Mia may have “instructed” Dylan lying about this. Mia’s adopted son, Moses, 43, has also long claimed that his mother “brainwashed” Dylan to make him believe.
Woody and Soon-Yi have been married since 1997 and have two adopted daughters. There was never another sexual abuse charge against him, before or after that with Dylan. Experts in the field say that those who attack young people tend to commit these crimes repeatedly.
The sad part is that Dylan Farrow seems to believe that she was Woody’s prey. She may never recover from these seemingly false memories.
So the filmmakers, and Mia Farrow, should be ashamed.