To boot, our protagonist is named Gatsby (Timothée Chalamet), and we are supposed to take it seriously without the moniker ever being addressed or mocked for its pretentiousness. Of course, Allen has his own sanitization at play, with a Gossip Girl-oriented world in which its main characters live in palatial Upper East Side abodes and there are actually multiple large rooms in every apartment featured. And “real,” in this sense, is not designed to infer how gritty and authentic it is, but rather, how sanitized and banal it has become. One in which the Met is essentially empty to allow two romantics to wander through it undeterred by the endless iPhone photo snappings, one in which SoHo is still deemed an “artsy” neighborhood and one where nobody uses Uber but instead always hails a yellow cab. With that pendulum having completely swung in the other direction in what is now arguably the most corporate and least creative city, Allen has clearly chosen to remain in an alternate universe of New York. A city that wasn’t once so policing in political correctness, the epicenter of a philosophy that promoted separating the artist from the work. While New York has long been Allen’s primary muse in film, it is interesting to note that this is the first time its name has been featured in a title (barring the auteur trilogy New York Stories, which he had no hand in choosing the name of) and that this is the very city that has shunned him most forcefully. The very ones from Dylan Farrow that arose in 1992, when Allen fever in New York was still a viable draw to the indie box office sensibilities of that town. because of the ongoing sexual allegations against Allen. But no, we are in the Paris of 2019, one of the only places that has agreed to distribute A Rainy Day in New York after it was banned in the U.S. The herd of people extending down the block, paired with a sighting of Isabelle Huppert, would lead one to believe that this could very well be New York in the mid-90s, when Allen was still at a peak of what he would refer to as “pseudo-intellectual” cachet in a city that once prided itself on pseudo-intellectualism before falling completely prey to what the tourists wanted (T.G.I. A crowd outside of the theater clamors to get into two sold out showings of Woody Allen’s latest movie.
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