Manhattan: movie with love... to a city

Woody Allen's Manhattan features black and white cinematography - by Gordon Willis - with a beauty rarely seen in the cinema.

The movie is light, grand and balanced. Seen at first as a romantic comedy depicting the relationship between a middle-aged man and a teenager, the plot takes on complexities that only passionate people will be able to recognize. Isaac's and Tracy's romance does not thrive because of sheer immaturity ... of him.

Although the romantic mood is always present, what you see most during the development of the plot are people who can't stand experiencing happiness and are always looking for justification to break up with their partners: Isaac persuades Tracy to leave it; Mary, who is having an affair with Yale, also asks him to leave her because he has no nerve to leave his wife; Yale himself encourages a relationship between Mary and Isaac to later regret.

It seems that romances are a pretext for the director to celebrate his private love for Manhattan, a place he loves. From the opening of the movie, with dawn in Central Park to George Gershwin's Blue Rhapsody, to the iconic scene of the couple Mary-Isaac on a bench on Sutton Square overlooking the Queensboro Bridge, what follows is a sequence of New York rituals of that time: going to the Guggenheim Museum, art films, lake boats, concerts, Chinese food and a string of romantic songs performed mainly by the New York Philharmonic, under the baton of historic conductor Zubin Mehta.

At the end of the movie, after meetings and mismatches, it seems that, along with Isaac, we all fell in love with Tracy aka Mariel Hemingway. Her acting is so natural and devoid of glamor that she seems to be the only person balanced within a multitude of beings utterly unable to get along serenely. When everyone introduces themselves, they speak not what they are but what they do, it is Tracy's most entertaining speech. After people say they are from TV, from the publisher, from literary criticism, she says:

─ I'm from high school.

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