In this atmosphere of abdicated authority, “Manhattan” was bound to avoid certain criticisms. Notably, Allen’s love interest in the film, Tracy, does not even have a surname. His parents never show up and are hardly referenced. The tone of the film saves even a moment of tension, wondering if Tracy’s father is going to enter Elaine’s house, where her daughter is going to have dinner with Isaac and her friends, and demands to know what, in the name of sanity, is happening.
These friends, in turn, do not question Isaac or his choices. The relationship seems perfectly reasonable in their opinion, based on the fact that Tracy is “beautiful” and “brilliant”. Isaac is presented as a man of indisputable character because he does not like crass commercialism, narcotics and infidelity.
Mariel Hemingway, who played Tracy to great acclaim, spent her time on the “Manhattan” set doing homework and skipping rope. She was 16 years old. In a memoir published in 2015, she said that after the film was made, Mr. Allen asked her to travel to Paris with him. She did not tell this anecdote to suggest that he was “scary”, she said in an interview at the time. Instead, she was trying to convey the degree to which she had been alone.
“My parents wouldn’t come up and say, ‘I’m sorry, Mr. Allen, you are too old for our 18-year-old daughter at the time,'” she said. “It was always up to me to find my voice.”
For a short time in college, when so many of us are looking for ourselves, I attended weekly group therapy sessions with a woman my age who was dealing with the effects of a relationship that had started, with the encouragement of her parents. , when she was 15. The man was a decade older. As shocking as it was, I still hadn’t made the kind of connection that could have diminished my affection for “Manhattan” in any way.
The Allen-Farrow scandal broke out in August 1992, oddly enough, while the city’s tabloids were still well fed by the story of a Long Island teenager, Amy Fisher, who three months earlier shot and injured the 38-year-old car’s wife. years old mechanic with whom she was having an affair. Joey Buttafuoco quickly became an object of scorn – an easy role to fall on when you don’t have the money and sophistication that tend to soften the edges of depravity. What was he doing with Amy Fisher? He was not taking her to the philharmonic. We were still far from an inflection point. Jerry Seinfeld suffered less disapproval when, in 1993, at the height of his television stardom, he started dating a senior at Nightingale-Bamford School on the Upper East Side, whom he had met in Central Park. Comic companions ridiculed him; many ordinary people found the relationship unpleasant. But, a year later, People magazine, as if resolving a misunderstanding, presented the duo on the cover with the title: “See who’s in love: Jerry Seinfeld, 39, and Shoshanna Lonstein, 18, make an unlikely romance work. ”.
If such an image is unthinkable today, it is because young women have demanded that we stop normalizing exploitative relationships where my own generation could not. After watching “Allen v. Farrow ”, I returned to“ Manhattan ”for the first time in at least 15 years. It turned out that it was not necessary to involve torturous questions about how to separate art from man, because it was easy to separate art from reverence.