By Eliza Rosenberry
Woody Allen movies are always very obviously Woody Allen movies. Even as his films branched out from Diane Keaton love affair storylines (see Zelig and Vicky Cristina Barcelona for two of his most creative pieces), there are elements in each that make them definitively Woody Allen.
Although most of these commonalities are characterizations of the autobiographical protagonist (neuroticism, intellectualism, self-alienation), Allen also places a significant value on the location of his films. Most of his earlier works take place in New York City. In Annie Hall, Allen’s character notes that he is too East Coast-neurotic to live in California, thereby correlating mentalities to geographies. Vicky Cristina Barcelona similarly relies on the exoticism and unfamiliarity of the city to create a foreign, dreamlike state of consciousness. Midnight in Paris, Allen’s newest film, again toys with the notion of tourism but also develops a more complex relationship between the protagonist (a pitch-perfect Owen Wilson) and the city (Paris).
