The four-episode documentary made by Kirby Dock and Amy Ziering, which reconstructs the allegations against Woody Allen, aired on HBO in February of this year and generated a lot of discussion, not because it really says anything new about the case, nor why. affects Allen’s already destroyed reputation, but because it touches central topics in the debate of recent years. Now SkyDoc retrieves it for Italy (from 9 July, and on demand on NOW).
The painful story is well known: in 1992 Mia Farrow accused ex-boyfriend Woody Allen of sexually assaulting her adopted daughter Dylan, at the time seven years old. The director has always defended himself by claiming that Dylan was manipulated by Farrow herself, out of revenge, once she discovered her relationship with Soon-Yi, her eldest adopted daughter. The documentary also suggests that Allen began her relationship with Soon-Yi when the girl was still a minor.
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Dylan as a child
The main novelty are the unpublished videos, shot by Farrow shortly after the incident, in which Dylan as a child talks about the harassment he suffered. It is a very strong material, which in the overall picture of the argument makes it rather difficult to believe in Allen’s innocence. The most relevant idea, however, is to put Dylan herself, now 37 years old but still clearly marked by trauma, at the center of the reconstruction. It is a precise political choice: the authors argue well how Allen’s version was more listened to, and how Hollywood continued to celebrate the director uncritically until 2017, when the metoo it marked a profound change in general sensibility. The Allen-Farrow case is explicitly compared to those of Weinstein or Bill Cosby, and a notable part is given to Ronan Farrow, the biological son of Woody and Mia, and one of the first journalists to write about Weinstein.
Too explicit position
Giving a voice to the victim is more than fair, but the stance here is too explicit: anything that could put the Farrow family in a bad light, for example, is systematically expunged. Paradoxically, in the end, this makes the argument less convincing.
Allen v. Farrow
Kirby Dock e Amy Ziering
Skydoc e NOW