電影《雨天·紐約》影評：#MeToo Movement & <A Rainy Day in New York>

After viewing the whole movie, the first impression of mine is that this film is so Woody compared to his works these years. He’s trying to paint a poetic rainy day of New York in his mind, filling it with his obsession towards relationships, celebrity culture and nostalgic urban life. I tried to find his personal footprints in this movie. He depicts the contradiction of urban between rural culture and modernity between nostalgia throughout the metaphors in his Mise-en-scène.

He tends to use this observer or narrator point of view to illustrate his story to create an old-school story-telling style. Meanwhile, he never misses the chance to create images where male and female characters encounter and talk on the street in a very casual way. In some sense, this point of view enhances casual and approachable feelings of walking down the streets in New York. Secondly, Woody Allen sets Rainy Day’s background back in New York City in nowadays. Modern settings like Metropolitan Museum, Central Park and famous hotels implied his familiarity and passion towards this city in an obvious way.

Quite ironically, in the movie, there are some self-related dialogues about directors’ originality and artistic pursuit against commercial values. Meanwhile, it seems that woody himself is doubting his own career life and his creative ability these days through the movie because of this #Metoo Movement in Hollywood, which deeply troubled his own creations. Woody Allen already had his deal terminated with Amazon and couldn’t make public screenings in America. #Metoo Movement has gone wild into a witch-hunt. Putting aside the fact whether he did it, should audience easily judge artists based on his/her private morality? Shouldn’t we focus more on the artistic side? If judging artists by their private morality is enough for audience to decide whether he/she is good, then what’s the point of critics? Although it is positive that #Metoo symbolizes as an empowerment to female, it is always important to reflect on overly-heated movements with rationality.

If we see the movement critically in Althusser’s point of view towards the influence of ideology, it is interesting to find how people in social movements internalized the ideology subconsciously by responding to the ideology interpellation towards individuals as Subjects. The Subject in the #Metoo Movement is the victim of powerful men. By looking at them as if against a mirror and answering back in the social media, women in this movement suffer the suffering of their fellows, thus strengthening the united value of feminism and the spirit of rivaling against vicious patriarchy. Dangerously, this kind of collective recognition can easily eradicate individual self by the alienation of true me or the loss of comprehensive identities since the uniform voice is a requirement of any revolutions or social movements.

This also expands the antagonistic gap between male and female. It is during the process of 「The Othering」 where they construct and strengthen their own single identity by opposition and simple dualism. Setting a clear boundary between male and female, #Metoo Movement participants successfully acknowledge themselves as rebels who definitely won’t accept the ideology that male and female shouldn’t be discussed separately or men shouldn’t be 「the other」. So now we have reasonable doubt that sometimes in order to achieve the goal of hurting male enemies, maybe Metoo activists won’t need the truth. They accept the pre-set image of the truth.

After attending this screening event, I feel sorry for Woody Allen not due to his personal sufferings, but simply because the film is a nice work and shouldn’t be gone in the wind.