Sunday out

I own a copy of the Woody Allen movie, Manhattan. While watching it can be a little -- what's the opposite of deja vu? Presque vu? -- anyway, it's weird because it was way before Woody decided to make his adopted daughter his mistress and then wife. And in Manhattan, he's a 40-something writer having a "fling" with a precocious 17-year-old, Tracy, played by Mariel Hemmingway. He obviously crafted her role to be a middle-aged man's fantasy woman: she's beautiful in an innocent, almost virginal way, but she's sexually rambunctious--"How many times can you do it in one night?" he asks, and she answers, "Well, a lot.." and he snaps back, "A lot is my favorite number." She's also smart and perceptive, and this kind of backfires on him when, since he's fallen for the attractive, neurotic Mary played by Diane Keaton, he attempts to break up with Tracy in a "let her down easy" kind of way. He tries to convince her that their age difference means they could never be a serious couple, and that she has a whole lot of other options. He even starts naming off some of her high-school aged possible suitors, "Biff, or Tommy, or Scooter." She's not buying it. They're, quaintly, having this break-up scene at a soda fountain (probably one of the last existing ones in Manhattan in the 70s). She asks him why he's trying to make it sound like it's to her advantage. He persists, asking how can she think she's in love with him, and what is love anyway? Her answer--so simple and wise-- stands out: "We have laughs. I care about you. Your concerns are my concerns. We have great sex." At one point he tells her to stop being so precocious. He's patronizing and paternalistic, but we know that she is the only "real" character in the film, the only (and how I hate using this word now, it's so overused) authentic person.

There are other lines I love in that movie--it's one of the best for witty dialogue. In another break-up scene, Diane Keaton is getting dissed by her married boyfriend, played by Michal Murphy. She knows what's coming and she won't even look him in the eye. She seems to have a permanent smirk on her face, kind of a wise-guy defense to rejection. He tells her they should stop seeing each other, and she says she knew this was coming. She could tell by the tone of his voice on the phone. "Very authoritative, you know, like the Pope, or the computer in 2001." I have heard that voice, and I'm sure many people have, maybe not in the same context of this kind of relationship, but as a foreshadowing of things to come (usually a loss of some kind.)

And then there is the sad line that I think was possibly a mistake left in because it worked. Diane Keaton has called up Michael Murphy to see if he can come out for a walk. It's a Sunday and she's bored and lonely, but of course he has a wife and has plans with her. Diane Keaton, who obviously usually doesn't take the initiative, says she called him because, "It's Sunday out..." I think she mean to say "It's sunny out," because the day significantly turns rainy when she's finally out walking with Woody Allen and they get soaked. But how sad and plaintive is that "It's Sunday out." She needed to fill up her Sunday and was trying to get out into it, leave her apartment container, and pretend for a while to be "normal." Sundays can be the loneliest days (for me it probably goes back to the discomfort of getting ready for church, my mother's tension around that, and the forced, uncomfortable family dinner in the middle of the day). And "it's Sunday out" seems perfectly descriptive.