Harry dans tous ses états (Deconstructing Harry)

Or, Woody Allen in his four dimensions

Harry is a successful author, whose highly autobiographical inspiration causes him a few serious problems. His characters, drawn from those around him and fashioned kaleidoscopically over the course of the stories, draw the novelist into a generalized conflict. For his friends and the members of his family, recognizing themselves in this or that character or event, come one after another to ferociously reproach him for the swipes he thus dares to deal, publicly, at their intimacy, at their image.

Woody Allen—performer, screenwriter, and director of the film—treats with mastery the dilemmas of the author confronting his creation. Blending very subtly—but at times with confusion—reality and the imaginary, he draws the spectator along with him into his desperate search for identity, into his universe, which he describes in four dimensions: the imaginary, fantasy, dream, and reality. It is no doubt in this last dimension that he has the most trouble living, of course; preferring the escapes that artistic creation affords him, such as the powerful representation and the blurriness of his own character in Harry’s novels (played here by Robin Williams).

Leaping from one world to another, Woody Allen paints this character, Harry, in dark tones, as a wounded man; a lover overtaken by age and prey to the Dantean hell of the demon of youth; a mediocre husband according to his successive wives; an eternal patient of multiple and omnipresent psychoanalysts. A father, finally, lived in the mode of frustration, his relations with his son growing more and more chaotic thanks to the child’s mother who, multiplying incidents and proceedings, of course contests his aptitudes for being a worthy father.

The passage from one to another of these various, tightly entangled universes gives him the occasion to settle conflicts, once again, with his old demons, which make up the small obsessive world that has by now become familiar to his audience. From the misunderstandings with the family: a mother (Jewish to a fault), a father whom he has (at last) forgiven, a sister who forcefully takes up the torch of her parents’ religion (an astonishing Demi Moore). Passing precisely through religion—by which he acknowledges being deeply imbued but whose superstitious excesses he denounces, having Harry affirm that it separates men more than it binds them. And ending on human fragility, implacably dependent on his mental universe.

Here is a film of which it could be said that it is in the image of its humor, irresistibly dark. It remains, without a doubt, one of the most moving and most profound of Woody Allen’s films. Not to be missed!•

Gustave Doré, La Bible : Job et ses amis (The Bible: Job and His Friends)