"Darling, have you seen my Strindberg book?"

dialogism as social discourse in match point

D. E. Wynter

pp. 137-155

in: Klára S. Szlezák, D. E. Wynter (eds), Referentiality and the films of Woody Allen, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015

Abstract

Woody Allen has appropriated several nineteenth-century literary works in the creation of Match Point (2005). Much has been written about the film as an appropriation of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment (Stuchebrukhov 142; Schwanebeck 363). What has gone unnoticed, however, is that Allen derives the infrastructure for the relationship between the two main characters in Match Point from August Strindberg's Miss Julie (1888) and constructs his thematic examination of the unpunished criminal upon the narrative groundwork laid by Strindberg in his plays There Are Crimes and Crimes (1899) and Pariah, a one-act (1889). This chapter examines the influence of the Swedish playwright on Match Point, and argues that Allen's interaction with Strindberg's works exhibits the quality of dialogism and creates a complex discourse on the internalization of status and oppression, a theme intrinsic in much of Allen's work (Lucia 40).

Cited authors

Strindberg August