Warning: This text incorporates particulars of sexual assault.
Filmmaker, and self-described “poster boy” for the #MeToo motion (critically) Woody Allen has a brand new film out, Coup de Probability, his first ever French language movie, which was both a stylistic selection or he has lastly run out of Individuals who’re keen to work with him.
Coup de Probability is a few married lady who has an affair with a author. However the brand new lover quickly will get whacked by her husband when he finds out concerning the relationship. So just about the identical film that Allen has already made twice earlier than.
Clearly lots of people don’t need to assist this movie, or any venture helmed by Allen, because of the allegations that he sexually abused his daughter, Dylan Farrow, when she was seven-years-old (see additionally: all the opposite creepy shit he’s accomplished). However this film could also be notably objectionable, as a result of one facet of the story might doubtlessly be interpreted as a grotesque nod to his alleged crime.
Of their evaluation of the movie, NPR famous that Coup de Probability incorporates one “appalling” element — the villainous husband character is obsessive about mannequin trains. “Might Allen be referencing his personal off-screen scandals, and to what goal?” the reviewer requested.
That’s as a result of a mannequin prepare set was some of the necessary components within the case towards Allen. By Dylan Farrow’s account, she was instructed to play with a toy prepare set through the alleged assault. “To this present day, I discover it troublesome to take a look at toy trains,” Farrow wrote in a 2014 open letter printed by The New York Occasions.
However Allen and his supporters have tried to discredit Farrow by suggesting that “there was no prepare set within the attic.” Then got here the 2021 HBO documentary sequence Allen v Farrow, which offered a very damning piece of resurfaced proof: a 1992 police diagram of the attic the place the alleged abuse occurred, and it clearly referenced a “toy prepare monitor.”
HBO
In his 2020 memoir Apropos of Nothing, Allen tried to argue that the prepare set didn’t exist, claiming that Farrow’s description of the toy prepare was “a recent artistic contact,” a “plot twist” that had been belatedly added to make her story appear extra “credible.” He identified that the prepare “by no means got here up a single time throughout all of the months of investigation in any of Dylan’s quite a few interviews.” However based on Allen v Farrow, the toy prepare set was introduced up in “no less than seven interviews with (Dylan’s) pediatrician and key investigators in 1992.”
So, the precise reverse of what Allen stated?
HBO
Which is all to say that Allen sticking a mannequin prepare set into his first film since all of this was dropped at the fore by the documentary appears fairly bizarre. His followers would possibly argue that it’s only a coincidence, however come on, Allen has made roughly 5,000 films (give or take) in his lifetime, and solely now determined to write down a few character who’s obsessive about toy trains?
If we have been to additional choose aside this film’s message, the train-loving husband kills his spouse’s lover, a jazz-loving author actually named “Alain” (delicate, Woody). So the Allen surrogate falls sufferer to a person whose favourite interest displays the controversial proof towards Allen? It’s as if Allen took his cultural cancellation and twisted it right into a story about unjust homicide by which he’s the sufferer. In his dumb guide, Allen equally in contrast himself to a sufferer in a Hollywood film: “I used to be now the real-life protagonist of a drama about an harmless individual, wrongly accused.”
I imply, positive, it’s only a prepare set, but when O.J. Simpson had ever written and directed a film by which one of many characters saved making an attempt on gloves, you must admit, it might be robust to not deal with that one element.
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