Every week Nicotina brings us an unforgettable female character from the movies. A girl you just can’t miss. This week, Nicotina suggests you meet Tracy from Manhattan (1979), directed by Woody Allen.
It’s near impossible to pick a favourite woman from Woody Allen’s work, but the disarmingly sensitive 17-year-old Tracy (played by Mariel Hemingway) with a self-awareness about her is the first image in my head. Perhaps it’s because I’ve been thinking of her in relation to two contemporary writer/actors who have written themselves into Allenesque, garrulous socially awkward writer/artist/intellectual roles. Lena Dunham as Hannah in Girls and Josh Thomas as Josh in Please like Me have both chosen to write their significant loves (Adam Driver as Adam and Wade Briggs as Geoffrey respectively) into their shows very much as angelic Tracys to their own jaded Woodys. While Adam and Geoffrey are given to being quirky, Hemingway’s Tracy is perhaps the most guileless and strangely also the wisest of the lot. What Allen says in the film to Hemingway’s Tracy could be true of all these characters, but is perhaps more perfect just for her: “You know what you are? You’re God’s answer to Job, y’know? You would have ended all argument between them. I mean, he would have pointed to you and said, ‘Y’know, I do a lot of terrible things, but I can still make one of these’.”