Woody Allen goes back to New York

The new Woody Allen’s movie Whatever works brings  back  the favorite director’s setting: New York. The city that hadn't appeared in the last four movies directed by him, returns to the scene as well as his sarcastic humor.

Whatever works tells the story of Boris Yellnikoff (Larry David), a grumpy old man that was almost nominated to the Nobel Prize for quantum mechanics. Currently, he is a retired nuclear physicist and a chess teacher. Although considering the only one who can understand the human aspirations he has his life changed when a young girl, Melodie St. Ann Celestine ( Even Rachel Wood) appears on his door asking for a place to stay.

Melodie is a silly girl from Mississipi, naive and hopeful that her future will be great in NY.  In the course of time, she doesn’t seem to have plans to leave Boris’s apartment, until one day she admits she has fallen in love with him.

Whatever works is full of good moments and great dialogues, reminding the best Woody Allen’s pictures like Every Thing You Always Wanted to Know About Sex * But Were Afraid to Ask(1972), Annie Hall (1977), Zelig (1983) and Hollywood Ending (2002). The director had success in bringing back his best feature: the ironic humor that a long time was lost in his movies. 

Fernanda Jorge