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Another director I am slowly but surely following is Woody Allen, whose work I have always admired for style and intent, although many times his movies have fallen short of what I would consider great for me. In sharp contrast to the movie Sleeper, which I reviewed recently, comes Manhattan. This is Woody Allen's love song of old love stories and New York; or at least, that's my interpretation of it. It stars Allen himself as Isaac, a divorcee who is dating a significantly younger girl named Tracy (he spends his whole time dating her trying to convince her that their relationship won't last because she has so much life ahead of her). He is good friends with a married couple named Yale and Emily, and Yale confides to him that he has been having an affair with a woman named Mary (Diane Keaton, of course). Yale and Mary love each other, but Yale also loves his wife and doesn't want to leave her. Isaac can't stand Mary when he first meets her, but then finds himself more connected to her than to his young girlfriend.

These triangles show us the negative sides of many people, and, like many Allen movies, I initially got frustrated with how lightly all of the characters seemed to treat relationships and love. There were no rules to get in any of their way, not even for Isaac's now-dating-a-woman ex-wife (played by the youngest Meryl Streep that I've ever seen), who decides to write a tell-all book about their relationship and divorce. It's confusing and kind of terrible, which is the point. As the movie progressed I could see that these people are searching for love and searching for their own idealized versions of love, and in the process, they do in themselves and their relationships.

I've often criticized movies for having all unlikable characters, making it difficult to root for or identify with any of them. Here, most of the characters are completely unlikable. They are all engaging in affairs and are self-indulgent, and their only likable qualities come in the clever lines of dialogue they give. But like I said, that's the point, and the character the audience ends up connecting with is actually Allen as the writer and director (and I guess partially Isaac, who is basically an extension of him). It's Allen who uses these characters to explore ideas that bring the movie together and make the unlikable characters worthwhile. They serve a purpose, along with the backdrop of the city, to show us the errors of the characters as well as present Allen's idealized view of love.

All of his movies seem to reference old-fashioned movies, and in the black-and-white Manhattan, Allen's romanticized New York is what transforms Isaac's own direction in love. For once, a character seems to get his life on track, and the movie ends with a vein of hope, in a place I didn't expect. Maybe it all ends for the best, or maybe this romanticized ending is just another chapter in Isaac's pursuit of the ideal love story for himself, and he'll screw it up in a few months' time. But I'm going to be a romantic too, and go along with the ending filled with gorgeous shots of New York (cinematography by Gordon Willis) and the rising sounds of Gerswhin's Rhapsody in Blue. It's an old-fashioned ending, just like the old movies set in the old New York.

I totally fell for it by the end, despite how turned off I was by the early scenes with Mary. The tide turns for me when Isaac and Mary run inside from the rain together, and it continues through the rest of the movie. It's been a while since I've been swept up by an ending, and those last shots with the Gershwin really inspired me, and as soon as I was able to sit at the piano again, I pulled out Rhapsody in Blue and gave it a bumbling-but-heartfelt go (and that's saying a lot because I played that song until I hated it back in the day). When all's said and done, it's Allen's New York and sentimentality for the old-fashioned that got me, and I think this is now my favorite of his films.