Film Review
It may be heretical to say it (or even think it), but
Star Wars wasn't the most important
film to be released in 1977. The year's other big hit,
Annie Hall, probably had a far
greater cultural impact, as it completely redefined the romantic comedy
and forever altered how relationships between men and women were to be
portrayed on the screen. True,
Star
Wars did usher in a cultural and technological revolution of its
own (on the back of a massive self-promotional campaign), but
Annie Hall was just as influential
and represents no less a cinematic milestone. The film was a
significant turning point in the career of its writer-director Woody
Allen, marking a decisive break from his early lowbrow farces -
Sleeper (1973),
Love and Death (1975) - and the
beginning of his more mature phase, in which he became far more
preoccupied with the deeper, more serious aspects of human experience,
such as the apparent incompatibility of the sexes and the elusive
nature of true love.
For
Annie Hall, Woody Allen
appears to take his cue from Ingmar Bergman's
Scenes from a Marriage (1973),
performing a similarly rigorous post-mortem on a failed relationship,
in an attempt to work out just why it is that men and women cannot
sustain a lasting love affair. As well as
being one of Allen's most
insightful films, it is also his funniest, and a pretty good contender
for the funniest film ever made. Many of Woody Allen's greatest
one-liners are here, including: "Sex with you is really a Kafka-esque
experience" and "Hey, don't knock masturbation. It's sex with someone I
love." It also includes what is arguably the best visual gag of
any Woody Allen film (when our hero sneezes away a small fortune in
cocaine), and features Diane Keaton in her best comedy role (proving she can sing as
well as act).
Annie Hall breaks new ground
for Allen both in its content (less slapstick, more character depth)
and in its non-linear structure (the film should be especially noted
for its highly effective use of flashbacks and flash forwards).
Allen's willingness to experiment goes as far as to include a mad
animated digression, numerous asides where Allen talks straight to
camera, and several sequences in which the main characters turn up in
their past lives, like ghosts - all hilarious. The result is a
fragmented flurry of experiences, part real, part imaginary, reflecting
the confused state of mind of someone who is struggling to comes to
grips with the onset of a mid-life crisis. When he set out to
make the film, Woody Allen was inspired by Federico Fellini's
8½ (1963), and whilst
his film is every bit as vibrant and daring as Fellini's great
cinematic folly, it attains a far higher degree of narrative and
stylistic coherence, and is consequently a far more accessible
work.
Annie Hall provided
a leaping off point for much of Allen's subsequent work, and many of
its central themes (including the director's love for New York and
abject loathing for Los Angeles) would recur in later films, becoming
his personal trademark.
Woody Allen was himself greatly disappointed by the film, as it failed
to turn out as he had hoped. The critics thought otherwise and
Annie Hall was widely hailed as a
modern comic masterpiece. The film was to be one of the
director's most commercially successful, taking 38 million dollars
worldwide, recouping its modest production cost almost ten times.
The film won four Oscars in 1978, including awards for Best Picture,
Best Director, Best Original Screenplay and Best Actress (Keaton);
Allen was himself nominated for the Best Actor award (for the first and
only time in his career). With
Annie
Hall, Woody Allen left the world in no doubt that he was a
serious auteur filmmaker - one with a supreme talent for drawing art from life,
finding humour in the tragedies of human experience whilst never
letting us forget its pains and upsets. His best work was just
around the corner.
© James Travers 2012
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Next Woody Allen film:
Interiors (1978)
Film Synopsis
Alvy Singer is a New York stand-up comedian who is still obsessed with
his former girlfriend Annie Hall, a year after their relationship
ended. With two failed marriages already under his belt,
Alvy really believed Annie would be his lifelong partner, but it was
not to be. Just where did it go wrong? Alvy recalls their
first meeting and how easily they became friendly towards one
another. Admittedly, Annie, an aspiring singer, didn't share his
morbid obsession with misery, failure and death, and she didn't seem
that pleased when he insisted she should hold onto her insect-infested
apartment, but apart from that, and her inability to make love to him
without the stimulus of mind-altering drugs, he would say that they had
a pretty secure relationship. By the time Annie had hooked up
with a record producer who was eager to make her a star, it was all
over bar the screaming. As Annie starts a new life in Los
Angeles, Alvy writes a play about his affair with her, but cannot
resist giving his fiction a happy ending.
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.