Although a career as long as it is brilliant is self-explanatory and does not need time breaks to highlight it, those of us who enter adulthood in the years ofAnnie Hall and Manhattan, we still remember the revelatory power of the characters played by Diane Keaton, and the news of her death this weekend calls for explicit recognition.
In the late 1970s, emerging from the restraint and isolation of modernity that came with such a remarkably backward-looking dictatorship as Franco's, everything about that actress suggested a change of era toward women's liberation and, to put it in a modern way, she represented the epitome of empowerment and equality, failures, and emotional misunderstandings in relationships, laid bare before the viewer with as much pain as a sense of humor.
The world was much less interconnected than it is now, and listening to Diane Keaton's dialogue with Woody Allen was like seeing with our own eyes that there was more to the world, that it was in New York, that it was several years ahead of us, and that noticing the connection despite the distance was like feeling a little smarter and a little less alone in the universe.
Keaton brought her personal elegance without imposing it, asserting her personality as an independent, attractive woman who militantly flouted conventional cinematic sexualization, with a wardrobe designed to assert herself and make her feel comfortable in her own skin. Whether you liked that or not, it wasn't her style. Neither the United States nor New York are what they used to be, but we'll always have the Manhattan of Diane Keaton and Woody Allen.
