/ 12 June 1998

Harry meets Woody

Derek Malcolm Not quite the movie of the week

This year’s Venice festival kicked off with a new work by an old master. At least some would call Woody Allen that – rather more, as he keeps on saying, in Europe than in the United States.

He was not in town for the premiere of his latest comedy, Deconstructing Harry, because he hates the fuss of festivals. But it almost seemed as if he were there, since he plays the deconstructed Harry – a writer from New York City whose life is a mess largely because of the way he has treated the women in it. The film keeps one wondering how much is real and how much imagined.

It is probably one-third pretty near the truth and two-thirds fiction, and it went extraordinarily well with Barbara Kopple’s Wild Man Blues, a full-length documentary about Allen that was also shown at the festival. That is about Allen’s jazz tour of Europe, but also peeks, sometimes with immoderate frankness, at the man behind the obsessive New Orleans clarinettist, who says at one point that, wherever he is, he really wants to be somewhere else.

It is a comment that could equally have been made by the fictional Harry – a man with an ex-wife, a mistress, a student who is in love with him, a psychiatrist who goes to bed with him and a black hooker who satisfies him in between.

Harry, though, is not the lucky man he might suppose. When he is honoured as a writer by his old university, he can only get the hooker to accompany him.

The story is told half as fantasy, half as reality. As a writer, he imagines certain circumstances that are played out before us, and they contrast with what is really happening in his chaotic life. Clearly this is meant to illustrate some serious points about the whole damned business of life and love.

It may, however, also offend. There has never been a Woody Allen film filled with more lewd jokes, four-letter words and nude female bodies. Nor has there been one less politically correct.

The Jewish Harry rails against Orthodox Jewry and their capacity to divide humanity into those who are Jewish and those who are not. As a writer he is endlessly surprised when his various women bitterly complain that his latest successful novel includes diatribes against them.

The all-star cast, which includes Demi Moore, Elisabeth Shue, Judy Davis, Mariel Hemingway, Kirstie Alley and Julie Kavner, go to it with a will and seem grateful to be playing a comedy that is more sophisticated than most.

That said, Deconstructing Harry has its dull patches, chiefly when a certain unfamiliar vulgarity takes over – and you begin to feel that Harry isn’t actually worth the close inspection he gives himself.

Like the fictional Harry, Allen seems a slightly sad figure, never quite happy enough to enjoy his success nor wholly able to relate to those around him except at a polite distance.