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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 November 2022
Abstract
Through a close reading of Woody Allen's Match Point (2005), this chapter describes pre-existing music's unique ability to manipulate film. Unlike the traditional film score, pre-existing music can bring to bear social, cultural, economic and/or political associations stemming from its various origins. As the use of pre-existing music in film has increased in recent years, exploration of its additive element can provide comprehensive and holistic interpretations of a given film or scene. While on the surface, the film questions socially grounded notions of divine justice, its quasi-Romantic narration criticizes normative tropes of masculinity in popular culture.
Keywords: opera, feminism, art
There's murder but it's used philosophically and not as a whodunit. I was trying to give a little substance to the story, so it wasn't just a genre piece.
‒ Woody AllenArt, for Allen, represents the ultimate attempt of humans to overcome mortality.
‒ Roumiana DeltchevaCinema scholar Ewa Mazierska describes how Woody Allen's 2005 Match Point deals with the effect of luck on human behaviour and the way society
should be organized to minimize the harm that people inflict on each other when pursuing selfish desires and needs. She writes that:
[Allen] offers complex answers to these questions, allowing different arguments to be presented and discussed. However, it is worth adding that his moral discourse, although polyphonic, is at the same time somehow limited because it is transmitted by the stories of male characters who test their moral qualities in relations with women. [Allen’s] positioning of men and women is meaningful, as it conveys the traditional, misogynist idea that men are moral agents, whilst women are purely the objects of their actions without agency of their own. (2011: 6)
In a Paris Review essay titled ‘What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men’, Claire Dederer writes, ‘Men want to know why Woody Allen makes us so mad. Woody Allen slept with Soon-Yi Previn, the child of his life partner Mia Farrow. Soon-Yi was a teenager in his care the first time they slept together, and he the most famous film director in the world.’ (2017).
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