Opening in quiet an odd style,
Deconstructing Harry started with a scene of a woman coming down a cab but the
frame was set in a backward and forth repetitions for several of times. It
actually made me think that the movie copy was corrupted or the movie player wasn’t
working well but then when the motion finally proceeded to the next scene, it occurred
to me that the whole thing was just a part of the treatment.
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| photo courtesy of wikipedia |
Deconstructing Harry was directed
and starred by Wooden Allen himself. It was the story of a successful writer
named Harry Block who drew inspirations from the people he knew. This would later caused Harry several effects in varying level of extremity,
like for his one particular novel that was blatantly based to his real life affair
with his wife’s sister Lucy. Lucy was the one seen in the beginning of the
movie, confronting Harry of his works and on how did it affect her relationship
with her fiancé.
There were lots of flashback
series along the movie. Also, several of the significant portions on Harry’s
novels were being demonstrated as Harry recalled and discussed it with his
therapist or with his friend. It quiet showed the deep connection that Harry
had with the stories he wrote and with the characters he developed therein. This
was another sort of Woody Allen’s work, wherein you would find yourself all
eyes and ears to the entire movie that was a mix of flashback and present, and a
combination of real (Harry’s real world) and unreal (Harry’s fiction world) situations.
Like all other Woody Allen’s
movies, Deconstructing Harry explored several themes that were associated with
Jews, psychological issues, and the social influences on human behavior.
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| Woody Allen as Harry Block |
The movie was an intellectual yet
amusing demonstration of the writer’s (Harry) psychological struggles, which
affected his relationships with the people around him. The film looked through
Harry’s personal life, invading its privacy and revealing to the audiences that
in spite of his career success, Harry was just another human with lots of flaws
and shortcomings. Like everyone else, he was also suffering the consequences of
his mistakes and failures in life, though he has been trying to patch things up
according to his basis of the right-things-to-do.
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| photo clip from the movie "Deconstructing Harry" |
There were also moments wherein
Harry was being confronted by all the characters that he had created. This gave
the impression that all the characters in a book were merely pieces of the
writer’s soul who breathed the fictional life in a fictional world. The book
characters, in one way or another were reflections of the writer’s subconscious
self, and this statement worked not only for Harry Block but for all the
writers out there.
Deconstructing Harry had the entertaining
twists and turns that would set you into outburst laughing and then in all of a
sudden would make you empathizing with the main character. If you have seen
others of Woody Allen’s movie, you would notice as well that he had a great
fondness for creating a main character with inclination to writing just like in
the films Midnight in Paris and Annie Hall wherein the main characters were also writers.
Woody Allen is such a laughing
deity who always impart to his audience a fair amount of laughing potion and a
great share of substantial thoughts. For this movie that was nominated for Academy
Award for Best Writing, Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen, I will give
a rate of 8 Espresso shots!
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