Woody Allen, the New Yorker who wants to be European

Woody Allen premieres his latest film at the Cannes Film Festival on Friday, finding comfort and adulation in Europe away from controversies that have tarnished his name in the United States.

The famed American director, who has produced more than 50 movies, is best known for a film career that has concentrated on his life-long love affair with New York, the city of his birth.

But the 79-year-old, who has sneered at Hollywood and generated almost as much newsprint about running off with his former lover's adopted child as for his work, has found in Europe something of a latter-day renaissance.

He has shot eight of his last 11 films on the old continent -- in London, Paris, Rome, Barcelona and the south of France -- and spoke last year of his dream of emulating the greats of European cinema.

"From the beginning, I dreamed of being Godard, Fellini, Truffaut or Resnais. Together with Bergman and Antonioni, these are the film-makers who made me want to do this job.

"I am part of a generation of directors who were not looking to Hollywood. We wanted to be Europeans!" he confessed in an interview with French weekly Nouvel Observateur published in October.

"My dream has come true: to become European -- or nearly," he said.

- Showered with accolades -

Born in the Bronx and raised in Brooklyn, Allen came from a Jewish family and his grandparents on both sides had emigrated from Europe.

His latest film, "Irrational Man," is filmed in Rhode Island and stars Joaquin Phoenix and Emma Stone.

Alongside his four Oscars and 24 Academy nominations, he won a lifetime achievement award at Cannes, the world's top film festival, in 2002.

He has been showered with awards in Britain, Germany, France, Spain and Italy, including a lifetime achievement award from the Venice Film Festival.

In Barcelona, there are even plans by production company Mediapro to open a museum dedicated to the life and work of Allen.

The president of Mediapro, Jaume Roures, is a friend and has produced three of his films, including "Vicky Cristina Barcelona".

German-Spanish critic Jan Schulz-Ojala of Berlin daily Der Tagesspiegel says Europeans appreciate his specifically Jewish and East Coast outlook on modern, urban life.

"His basic and non-destructible lightness in speaking about deep troubles relieves us and reconciles us with our own 'old European' melancholy," Schulz-Ojala told AFP in an email.

But if setting his recent films in some of Europe's most beautiful locales underlines his attachment to the continent, "too much postcard and pastiche" has cost Allen some of his originality, Schulz-Ojala said.

Allen has made no bones about making a film anywhere no-strings-attached finance is available and in 2012 he told British newspaper The Telegraph that Europeans had given "very, very generously" without interfering.

"I always wanted to be a foreign filmmaker," he told The Telegraph at that point, after having made seven films in Europe in seven years.

- 'Polanski-Allen syndrome' -

"But I'm from Brooklyn so I couldn't be because I wasn't foreign. But all of a sudden, through happy accidents, I've become one, to such a degree that I'm even writing subtitles. So I'm thrilled with that."

If Europeans admire his films, they have also been more tolerant of scandals that have plagued his private life.

In 1992, he left then partner Mia Farrow to start a relationship with her adoptive daughter from a previous marriage, Soon-Yi Previn, who was 21 at the time.

Allen and Soon-Yi are still together and have two children.

The film-maker was back in the headlines last year when his adoptive daughter with Farrow, Dylan, now 29, wrote an open letter to The New York Times alleging he molested her when she was seven.

A New York judge who presided over a 1994 custody battle between Allen and Farrow ruled the abuse allegations inconclusive, but lambasted the director as "self-absorbed, untrustworthy and insensitive".

"Let's call it the Polanski-Allen syndrome," said Schulz-Ojala, referring to Polish director Roman Polanski, who fled the United States after pleading guilty to unlawful sex with an 13-year-old in 1977.

"People who get fundamentally angry about these grumpy old men... belong mostly to those who always get morally angry against celebrities whom they want to be their role models," he said.

"Cineasts instead make the difference between life and work and defend the work against life."