Sep 4, 2015


'... 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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