Once a year, like clockwork, Woody Allen writes, directs and usually stars in exactly the film he feels like making. He works on budgets that make this possible--and just as well, given the mugging he has received from critics who think he shouldn't have made "Deconstructing Harry.'' His new movie is vulgar, smutty, profane, self-hating, self-justifying, self-involved, tasteless, bankrupt and desperate, I've read. Even the kinder reviews turn sour. Here's a quote from David Edelstein of Slate: "The result is more rambunctious--and more fun--than any movie he has made in years. What puzzles me is why it still adds up to something so anemic and coldly distasteful.'' When a film makes me laugh and then I learn that it's vulgar, I'm reminded of Mel Brooks' defense of "The Producers" (1968): "My film rises below vulgarity." That's the "Deconstructing Harry" defense; there is hardly a criticism that can be thrown at Allen that he hasn't already thrown at himself (or his alter ego) in the film. This is in many ways his most revealing film, his most painful, and if it also contains more than his usual quotient of big laughs, what was it the man said? "We laugh, that we may not cry.'' The film stars Allen as Harry Block, a novelist whose material vaguely suggests Philip Roth. Both names represent aspects of the character, who is blocked, and who is seen by many (and sometimes by himself) as Satan (often called Old Harry). Harry is under attack. His sister-in-law (Judy Davis) cries out that his new book "is totally about us''--about the two of them, and the affair she thought he would keep a secret. He's told he "can't function in life, only in art.'' We get the sense that many of the lines assigned to characters were first shouted at Allen himself; there's one line I'm willing to bet came from someone close to him: "This little sewer of an apartment where you take everyone's suffering and turn it into gold.'' Harry is a user and borrower: He uses people, and then borrows the story of how he used them, and uses that, too. The movie cuts between real time and fictionalized episodes from his books, in which Harry's clones and surrogates indulge their appetites when and as they can. Harry is a philandering cheater who has been through three wives and six therapists (the Kirstie Alley character is in both categories).