This essay argues that Woody Allen's break with Mia Farrow engendered
a search for a new artistic direction and a new persona, signaled by
the unsettling film Husbands and Wives (1992) and followed by two
extraordinary views of the moral dilemmas and personal sacrifices of a
life in art, Bullets over Broadway (1994) and Deconstructing
Harry (1997). These three films, the best of Allen's work in the
nineties, demonstrate a deeply reflective, and self-reflective, mood and
mode as the director meditates on the modernist issues of the autonomy
of the artist and the salvation of art. What may be hardest for his
audience to accept about these films is that they embrace a vision of
the artist/writer as a carnivorous creator of beauty and form, completely
indifferent to offending the moral sensitivities or violating the personal
sensibilities of those whose lives nurture and sustain his talent.
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