Marina Yardaeva How Woody Allen significantly trolled Russian viewers 10/07/2023, 08:02

What could be more arrogant today than talking about the crisis in marriage? In a time when there was no marriage anymore. At least marriage for life. Sociologists long ago explained to us that we live in an age of serial monogamy. This is the new normal and there is no need for drama here. What about comedy? Woody Allen’s The Great Irony has been in theaters for a week. And this is, of course, a movie about all of us.

The American director is of course trolling us all. Perhaps the Russian audience is particularly cynical. After all, he takes his new story from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. So how does he do this?

Woody Allen takes a classic plot, or rather a classic drama, full of human passions that drags the reader into various depths of human existence and other sufferings, and turns it all into a comedy. Either because the heroes of our time are oppressed, or, in principle, they have always been like that (that’s what you understand, Lev Nikolaevich).

Or maybe this was all done to spite the average person? Leaving reviews on the Internet like this: “At the age of forty I finally read Anna Karenina, I wasted my time, it would have been better if the heroine had killed herself at the very beginning, she is some kind of idiot, she traded her son for trousers. If Woody Allen targeted them, that’s really funny. After all, what are the odds of ladies who have been happily married to their first and only man for twenty years leaving such… thoughtful reviews?

Statistics are a stubborn thing: there are a lot of divorced singles in the world, including those who have been divorced twice and three times. In addition, if we are not talking about state registration acts, on average in the life of a modern woman trousers change about 8-10 times during her life, and “skirts” for men even more often – on average 25-30 times.

So why all of them? Because thank God the 21st century is just around the corner. Nobody stones anyone (in European societies), the doors are not tarred, everything is quite civilized. Changing partners and experiences is now as routine as marriage itself.

Closing one project called family and opening a new one, moving from one relationship to another, is no longer some kind of challenge, some kind of adventure, but rather an everyday occurrence.

Woody Allen’s characters, a divorced travel writer and his remarried former classmate, enter the novel and talk about the routine of marriage. Although it would be more accurate to talk about the routine of betrayal, in fact, they enter their love smoothly and do not fall as if falling into the abyss. Anna Karenina either loses her sleep and wanders around the station at night in a blizzard, then she has terrible dreams, then she throws hysterics at her husband and lover in turn, or she suppresses her emotions with morphine. You know what happened to him in the end.

But for today’s heroes, everything is smooth sailing; meetings held during lunch breaks. Although Woody Allen also has a train. Toy. She runs in circles in the rich house of her cuckold husband. He runs and runs, but he doesn’t even think about crushing his unfaithful wife. However, trouble happens to the heroic lover. But this is not because his conscience torments him so much, but because the modern viewer likes when a kind of detective streak touches the melodrama – it makes the plot more interesting.

But if you leave the intrigue required by art out of the equation, you’re left with two bored people enthusiastically complaining to each other about their failed marriages. One, a creative person, entered into an affair with a wingless woman, the other, an admirer of painting and literature (especially Tolstoy), first entered into a destructive affair with a drug-addicted musician, and then began to lick his wounds with a wealthy wealthy woman. boring man. Which of us hasn’t heard such stories in our own kitchen? Is there anyone who hasn’t made such a mistake by choosing the wrong people?

But we can make mistakes because we do. I mean, we can afford it. Long live serial monogamy! We were once told that love lasts three years. Then they added: A good (or simply bearable) quality marriage lasts an average of 5-7 years. And then everything turns into a pumpkin. And also rotten.

We were convinced that this was the natural course of events. And as always, exceptions only confirm the rule.

And what? How do we live with this? At first there was an enthusiasm for freedom. It’s great that you don’t have to endlessly try to revive an outdated relationship – there are a lot of interesting things in life! But then… People are so cruel that they get used to everything. I got used to freedom. And he started to bear the burden of it.

The man realized that everything was not going that way, “this marriage is broken, bring a new one.” No one will hand you anything on a silver platter. Get yourself moving again. Go to the store, that is, the dating app, the dance, the gym, the chess club. Check out the features, read the reviews, test, ugh, search, select, take a closer look. God, this is really boring. And how difficult. After all, given the enormous choice, there is again no alternative.

What if an accident suddenly happens, an unexpected encounter happens, my love? This is of course entirely doubtful. As if in an ordinary mass market, like those who sell nonsense on trains, a lady with a backpack pulls you by the arm, takes out Prada or Louis Vuitton from her backpack and seduces you to buy these things for three kopecks. . Some kind of fraud! Divorce, of course. If you suddenly believe in a gift of fate, everything ends there.

There is no gift. The joy of human communication is created by labor. The basis of intimacy is always seeking, active interest in another, willingness to pay attention and care. Even if it’s “no obligation friendship”, even if it’s just sex. Nothing happens without it, nothing happens without it.

What is this, are you working on relationships again? So did this happen after a shift at the office? What about after the hack? What about after all kinds of different lives? What’s the purpose? You’ll get tired before anything grows and solidifies anyway. We may already be born tired. And it seems that the crisis in family and relationships came with the beginning of the world. It was obscured by the needs of religion, morality, and ultimately economy, but in vain. Parallel lines do not intersect. And all kinds of “crossing lines; As soon as their paths crossed, they went in different directions,” just as the pernicious Count Tolstoy warned us. And “Anna Karenina” is always followed by the “Kreutzer Sonata.” And everything is rotting.

Everyone sees everything and everyone knows everything. But they still keep this Ferris wheel turning. There is probably a great irony in this: you no longer want to carry anything, it is not interesting and you have no strength, but you still secretly hope to win the lottery and try again and again. This means that the world is not hopeless. No matter how paradoxical it sounds.

The author expresses his personal opinion, which may not coincide with the position of the editors.