@northcoast said:

Look, I haven't seen this movie, and I don't like to spend too much time on boards where I haven't seen the actual film/television show in question, but, from reading this discussion, here are just a few thoughts:

The term "pedophilia" is thrown around way too much in our modern society (really, as it relates to entertainment, within the last 30 years or so). The term refers to sexual attraction to prepubescent children. It does NOT mean an attraction to someone who is 16 or 17, for example. While such an attraction (to a 16 or 17 year-old) might be, depending on the circumstances, unethical or immoral, it is not pedophilia. If it were, then a great many men-- some only a few years older than the person they might look at --who had any iota of a flash of attraction when they saw someone under 18 in a bathing suit, or any middle-aged woman who thought her daughter's 16 year-old boyfriend stepping out of a pool was "kind of hot", would be considered a "pedophile". Heck, such a loose definition would classify hundreds of millions (billions, really) of people outside of the U.S. and Canada as pedophiles . . . and, alluding to acontributor's post, many people in a number of U.S. states where the age of consent is under 18.

Read Allen's memoirs.

Has anyone here ever appreciated a nude "Classical" painting that was painted anytime in history right on up to the 1950s or so? Whether the painting was of a female or male? Or a Classical nude sculpture? If you have, then march yourself down to your local police station, declare yourself a pedophile, and turn yourself in. Because many-- and probably most --of the models used for those paintings and sculptures were younger than 18.

Neither a sculpture or a painting are human beings. If you broke an arm off a sculpture, should you march down to local police station and turn yourself in for assault?

See my posts on the films Walkabout (1971) and Ava (2017) for more on this. And also-- I'm just going to say it --all of this hand-wringing about such nudity definitely seems to have a racial aspect. When the actress or model in question is white, people scream "porn!" or "pedophilia!", but hardly ever if the subject of the nudity is black. Walkabout is a perfect example of this, actually, as there was plenty of underage nudity of aborigines-- and a white (male) child --but no one got worked up about it; only when Jenny Agutter got naked, was there a problem.

Interesting!

Concerning Woody Allen, from what I know of his case, the most disturbing thing for me there was not the age of his girlfriend's daughter, Soon-Yi (she was at least 18 at the time),

Again, if all you know about Allen is concerning his girlfriend's daughter, you don't know the half of it. Seriously. There's plenty to comb through.

but that she was . . . his girlfriend's DAUGHTER! In other words, the almost-familial circumstances of that situation.

You're right here, in that he's obviously comfortable dismissing limitations most people in society recognize.

But as others have said, I can separate the personal life of the man, from his art.

As can I, in most cases.

Although I've never been a big Woody Allen fan, anyway. The only film of his that I thought was particularly good was Bananas (1971).

Midnight in Paris, Cafe Society are two of my favourites from him. I think I even liked aspects of Scenes from a Mall.