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'... In many ways, Allen
has been working and reworking this reversal since Annie Hall and Sleeper, the
romantic plot of both films
essentially retellings of Shaw’s Pygmalion. “Do you think I’m stupid?” asks Luna (Diane
Keaton) in Sleeper, before
transforming herself with books of Marxist theory into a khaki-clad
revolutionary —“she’s read a few books and suddenly she’s an
intellectual,” complains Allen’s Miles. In Annie Hall, Alvie Singer
introduces to adult education classes, The
Sorrow and the Pity and therapy. “You’re the reason I got out of my room,
and was able to sing and get in touch with my feelings and all that crap,” says
Annie at the end, by which time she has fallen in love with the teacher of her
class on existential Motifs in Russian Literature. Like Miles, Alvie is hoist
by his own petard. In Hannah and Her Sisters, Michael Caine
woos Hannah away from her artist-lover Max Von Sydow with a book of poems by e
e Cummings, only to see her leave him, in turn, for her literature professor. In each case, the man, assuming a position of
intellectual superiority, establishes himself as the woman’s tutor-lover, only
to lose her once she grows confident enough to leave him. The problem with
entwining romance is that education has an end in sight: graduation.' — from my piece about Woody's Women for The Guardian
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