and Marshal Brickman, and other to Merial Hemingway for Best supporting Actress. Full of both profoundly humorous and devastatingly tragic scenes, Manhattan follows a well educated clique of modern day urban sophisticates set up against the backdrop of a panoramic black and white New York City. Under Allen’s crafty direction, this film lends itself in part to this bustling city, where in its products are all familiarly human, equipped with wavering ambitions and loose morals of which fit snugly within Allen’s archetypical character mold.

 With this group in particular, they find themselves constantly entangled within webs spun their own insecurity, while they battle commitment like addicts to a drug. And with this, Manhattan’s effect is powered by the wide breadth of numerous emotional tones that only within film-making itself are capable. Allowing the viewer to be drawn into the picture’s momentum with a variety of well placed techniques: Displacement of color, the camera’s specific staging, film score, etc, which all act in influencing us to empathize with it’s characters. Which are in this case, illustrated so wonderfully through Allen and Brickman’s script and perfectly paired to the atmospheric score by George Gershwin.

 

 In an attempt to encapsulate Woody Allen entire thematic vision down a single quote from his film ‘Love and Death’ where in Boris (Allen) listens to his cousin and wife Natasha, (Keaton) as she offers her theory of love:

 

  Natasha: “ To love is to suffer. So to avoid suffering, one must not love. But then, one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer, not to love is to suffer. To suffer is to suffer. But to be happy is to love. To be happy then, is to suffer? but suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be unhappy one must love. Or love to suffer, or love to suffer from too much happiness.”