What Mia Farrow Knew
The four-part HBO docuseries Allen v. Farrow opens with a gliding aerial shot of Manhattan, the camera moving slowly across Central Park: the baseball fields, the reservoir, the dark-green trees, lush summer, fecundity. But the music doesn’t suggest summer splendor; it’s ominous and portentous. We fly past the park, and the camera comes to rest at the grand facade of the Plaza Hotel, with its famous mansard roof, the copper burnished by time to a patina of sea-foam green, an echo of the green park beyond it. It’s a strangely loaded opening to the series: The Plaza figures in the saga only as the site of two press conferences related to the bitter custody fight between Mia Farrow and Woody Allen. But the music and the lingering shot of the building make it seem like a sinister location.
Something about the scene’s sweeping vision of Manhattan, its undertone of menace, and the arrival at the old, iconic building rang a distant bell. I realized that it reminded me of the opening of Farrow’s most famous movie, Rosemary’s Baby, in which the camera soars in the same omniscient and stately way above Manhattan apartment houses and then Central Park, gliding over the reservoir and the same dark-green trees until finding its target, another historic New York building with a complicated roof and a long history, the Dakota. In that movie, Farrow plays an expectant mother: kind, generous, and far too innocent to imagine that her husband’s strange behavior meant that he wanted to harm her baby.
This, too, is the implication of the series: that Farrow was a hopeful and gentle person whose family was preyed upon by evil. She had built a family out of her tremendous maternal sympathies and her compassion for children who are born into poverty. But she allowed Woody Allen into that family, and he allegedly defiled it by sexually molesting her youngest daughter, 7-year-old Dylan. (Allen has assiduously and repeatedly avowed his total innocence.)
[Read: The awful intimacy of ‘Allen v. Farrow]’
After the lingering shot of the Plaza, we take flight again, Peter Pan looking for the island of lost children. The camera leaves nightmarish Manhattan; it soars above a very different landscape: Farrow’s Connecticut country home, a white-clapboard farmhouse where a Currier and Ives dusting of snow covers the ground, signifying innocence, an escape from the sullied city. The snow is a purifying element, although we will also visit this location in summer, often in Farrow’s old home videos. Geese swim on the lake, children play on the shore, and the goodness and safety of the pastoral asserts itself. It’s a complicated symbol. The Connecticut
