Love and Death (1975)
Directed by Woody Allen

Film Review

And there was worse!  The conquering Napoleon chose this inopportune moment to invade Austria and, preferring their own stinky borscht to croissants and other tasty French delicacies, the Russians felt they had to take a stand.  Now Boris is a natural born coward and die-hard pacifist, the last man to get himself involved in a nasty set-to with the French.  (Are croissants and petits-fours really that bad?)  But war is war and Boris has no choice but to do his bit to save mother Russia from the nightmarish prospect of French cuisine.  As it turns out, Fate is kind to Boris.  Not only does he survive a bloody skirmish against the French, he ends up being feted as a hero after accidentally killing four enemy generals.  It gets better.  Thinking he will die in a duel after robbing a countess of her virtue, Boris extorts a promise of marriage from Sonja (luckily, her odoriferous husband has passed away by this point in the narrative).

Miraculously, Boris survives the duel and he and Sonja are soon wed, philosophising like they have never philosophised before and eating ice because they are too poor to afford real food.  When Napoleon's armies invade Russia, Sonja decides that drastic measures are called for.  Having formulated an intellectual justification for taking another person's life that overrides all a priori rational assumptions underpinning the morality of premeditated murder within a conceptual framework in which epistemological contradictions are subordinated to a contextual understanding of the essential dichotomy of subjective empiricism that both encapsulates and transcends all human experience (or something along these lines), Sonja decides to kill Napoleon.  Boris is lost for words.

Love and Death is the crowning achievement of Woody Allen's first 'wild and wacky' phase as a film director.  A riotous spoof on classic Russian literature that is funny even if you have never read Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, uproariously hilarious if you have, it is the film in which Allen hones his almost unrivalled flair for physical and verbal comedy to a fine art, shamelessly stealing from his heroes as he does so.  Allen's humour is obviously influenced by the comedy giants of yesteryear - Groucho Marx, Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin - whilst his self-indulgent homage (implausibly) includes numerous references to the work of Ingmar Bergman and Sergei Eisenstein.  Allen's writing and directing have by now caught up with his prodigious talent as a comic performer and as he enters his 'early mature' phase (his next film will be the highly acclaimed Annie Hall) Allen is at his most likeable and compelling.  Amidst all the tomfoolery and madcap comedy hi-jinks, Love and Death contains in embryo form many of the themes that would become essential to Allen's oeuvre in later years - it feels like a generously stuffed springboard to the great films that were yet to come.

War and Peace, The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment are among the great literary works that Woody Allen pokes fun at, aided and abetted by his perfect sparring partner Diane Keaton, with whom he now forms one of cinema's greatest comedy double acts.  Here, Keaton and Allen are performing at the same level and take an equal hand in fielding the seemingly endless barrage of gags, which range from mind-bending pseudo-philosophical exchanges that are excruciatingly funny (even if they give you a migraine), to inane sight gags of the 'bang me repeatedly on the head with a vase' ilk that you'd expect to see in a film comedy of the 1920s.  More than anything, it is the Allen-Keaton partnership, the fusion of too immensely talented comedy performers, that makes Love and Death Woody Allen's most relentlessly funny film.  It's obvious that Princess Leia was a fan - she clearly stole her hairstyle from Keaton (to say nothing of her disdainful frigidity).

The Ingmar Bergman references are the icing on the cake (or, if your personal circumstances are like Boris's, the ice on the ice).  In an obvious steal from The Seventh Seal (1957), Death appears as a scary old man in a sheet (this time a white one), his job being to collect the unlucky ones and take them on a long walk across open countryside (terrifying).  The very last shot of Keaton is framed precisely to match the famous 'duality shot' from Persona (1966), whilst other stand-out images from Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin (1925) keep flashing up on the screen throughout the surprisingly well-choreographed battle scenes.  (The film was shot in France and Hungary, an uncomfortable experience that put Allen off directing a movie outside the US for many years.)  Like his literary allusions, Allen doesn't expect you to recognise all these nods to his personal cinematic icons, but of you do the film is undoubtedly much richer and a great deal more entertaining.  And there's no shortage of 'Woody Allenisms' in the text - enough to pad out at least three anthologies of quotations.   On the 'G subject', Allen is uncharacteristically agnostic.  "If it turns out that there is a God, I don't think that he's evil. I think that the worst you can say about him is that basically he's an underachiever."  No one could ever accuse Woody Allen of being an underachiever.  Love and Death is an absolute delight.

Film Synopsis

A condemned man, about to be executed for a crime he did not commit, Boris Grushenko looks back on his short life, conscious that Death is even now beating a path in his direction.  Born into a Russian peasant family, he had a happy childhood in spite of the fact that most of the people around him were physically repugnant, mentally deficient and stank.  Death popped in to see him one day, but it was more a chance encounter than a social visit.  How he pined for his second cousin twice removed, Sonja, with whom he could enjoy deep meaningful discussions about the meaning of meaning whilst lusting after her even more meaningful physical adornments!  Boris wanted nothing more than to marry Sonja and take their wild orgies in philosophical discourse to a whole new level, but, alas, she chose to marry an ugly herring merchant who thought only of fish.