In Un final Made in Hollywood (2002), Woody Allen fantasized about the idea of a neurotic director in low hours who hid his recent loss of vision so that no one would stop him from completing a new feature film. With much reticence, it showed how it became the favorite of the season for specialized critics despite having been shot blind. David Trueba asks the American about the good reception that his films have always had in Europe in the interview that he did for Movistar Plus + and that the platform premieres this Friday, February 23. He receives from Allen a phrase typical of his comedies: “Perhaps, by translating them, they will improve them.”
During the meeting, condensed into just over 40 minutes, there are flashes of that self-deprecating sense of humor so characteristic of the New Yorker’s films and essays. One senses in that ironic response the little faith that the author of Annie Hall has in the future of what his art has been. It is something that he makes clear at the end of the talk. General fatigue is evident in an almost nonagenarian man; That fatigue compounds his caustic view of the industry over which he has reigned for several decades. In that vaudeville of the blind filmmaker that he himself played 20 years ago, that hopelessness gave him very good comic results.
The special is titled A day in New York with Woody Allen. For obvious reasons, she does not have the complicity with which Martin Scorsese scrutinized his friend Fran Lebowitz, who is another illustrious, acidic, atheist New Yorker born in the Jewish faith. Trueba and Allen are not friends, but they are connected somehow. And not only because of her gray hair and the thick frame of her glasses. They even agree that The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), that story about how the enormous redemptive power of art in the face of how disappointing life usually is, is one of the most inspired moments of his more than half a century of cinema. When the first movie of him, Take the money and run (1969), was released in American theaters, David Trueba was not yet born. It arrived on Spanish screens a few years later and his brother Fernando, who also interviewed the director in 2019, did have the opportunity to see it in a theater. He influenced the then film student, he himself said in his article, and perhaps, due to filial inheritance, he influenced the youngest Trueba.
In this special, the Spaniard walks through the New York sets where some of the scenes from Allen’s most representative films have been filmed. The skyscrapers of Manhattan accompany both in the constant shots-reverse shots of their conversation. Without reaching the depths of the mythical meeting between Truffaut and Hitchcock, the chat time allows the American to reveal what his creative process is like, from financing to working with the actors.
Director of Hannah and her sisters He filmed in Barcelona, Oviedo and San Sebastián, already in the final stretch of his career. During his time in Spain, he gained fame as a director with little taste for repeating takes. Some of David Trueba’s questions give the viewer the opportunity to conclude whether he does it because he perfectly controls his craft or out of mere apathy.
Already in 2002, the film critic of this newspaper Ángel Fernández Santos explained in his analysis about Un final made in Hollywood his own conclusion on the matter: “It is not the first time that poor workmanship, slovenliness, lack of care, the feeling of haste and indifference to the poor completion of scenes and even sequences take over a film by Allen and Despite this, it works,” he said.
The talk is an extra incentive to the ephemeral channel Woody Allen por M+ that the platform has created. It has a selection of 29 of his films – all those mentioned in this text are included in that selection – and will be available until March 3 in linear broadcast and on demand. These titles include the premiere of his last job, Stroke of luck. It is set in Paris and features French film stars, such as Melvil Popaud and Niels Schneider (star of the season’s series on French television, blood and moneyavailable on Filmin).
Allen’s fictions are so connected to his life, or at least with a transcript of his existence, that a good editor could construct a visual autobiography through excerpts from them. So much film material also enriches this Movistar Plus+ special. Trueba uses some moments as resource shots that accompany his or the American’s words. “Life is stupid… stupid and tragic,” the filmmaker told this newspaper in 2022. That’s why he’s been laughing at her for half a century.