Woody Allen (1975)
At the start of Husbands and Wives, a man is talking on television and quotes Einstein’s remark that ‘God doesn’t play dice’ with the universe. Woody Allen’s Gabe grumbles, ‘No, He plays hide and seek’, and switches the set off. Provided you’ve seen a Woody Allen film before, you hardly need to be given your bearings in his universe – this moment in Husbands and Wives feels like Allen getting a dig in at God before proceeding with a story that’s not going to provide much in the way of opportunities to keep up the assault. Love and Death, by contrast, provides an excellent setting for the meaninglessness of life and fear of death to be a main theme. This is a skit (it runs less than ninety minutes) on the types, tropes and obsessions of nineteenth-century Russian literature: spiritual crisis and metaphysical debate and speculation are part of the territory. But the film’s comedy derives principally from the anachronism of the protagonist Boris Grushenko’s post-Freudian, urban-neurotic sensibility: Woody Allen’s incongruousness as a bespectacled soldier/great lover in rural Russia during the Napoleonic era makes his egocentricity appealing here. And when the cowardly, bookish Boris is forced to enlist in the army, Allen tops his own incompatibility with the circumstances by producing a black drill sergeant (Frank Adu).
Sonja, Boris’s cousin and the only girl for him, is played by Diane Keaton, whose looks allow her to pass as a romantic heroine in this time and place: the physical credibility contrast between her and Woody Allen makes the partnership all the more effective. When Sonja, usually with Boris (but also in a scene late on with her cousin Natasha, well played by Jessica Harper), gets into philosophical discussion, Keaton delivers the mounting gobbledygook as if it were genuine, newly-hatched thought. What Diane Keaton does here is a wonderful demonstration of how much funnier a performance will be if the actor never makes you think she thinks she’s funny. The actors in smaller parts are remarkably disciplined too – no one looks to be straining to make his comic mark: James Tolkan as Napoleon (and his double) is especially good. Alfred Lutter III (memorable as Ellen Burstyn’s son in the previous year’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Any More) plays the young Boris – in his brief appearance he perfectly anticipates the cussedly anxious soul of Woody Allen.
Love and Death marks the end of the first main phase of Allen’s film-making career. From Annie Hall (his next movie) onwards, his comedy is rarely broad or light-hearted in the way this film is; the usual, though by no means invariable, setting is present-day New York. It makes you almost regret that he deprived himself of opportunities to write other scripts like Love and Death. The comedy is wantonly eclectic: that’s a big part of what makes the film so enjoyable. There are inspired things, like Boris’s riff, in the condemned cell, on Biblical descriptions of what makes, and will happen to, a good man and a bad man. The sight gags are, of course, fewer than the one-liners but there are more of them than you later came to expect from Allen and the physical comedy is very funny (especially in the sequence where Boris and Sonja are trying to assassinate Napoleon). When Boris, struggling to write a poem, invents and rejects as ‘too sentimental’ a line that turned up a century later in the mouth of J Alfred Prufrock, or goes into a rapid-fire punning exchange of Dostoyevsky titles, it doesn’t make you laugh – bits like this seem more designed to allow people in the audience who get them to feel smug that other people won’t. But the rate at which Allen tries things out, then drops or repeats them, is dazzling – and the sense of an abundantly brilliant comic intelligence in overdrive is elating. The BFI programme note included an(other) excerpt from Stig Bjorkman’s interviews with Woody Allen, and the latter’s perfect summary of his approach here:
‘Sure, we just used anything we wanted in those days. We took Russian books and Swedish films and French films and Kafka and French existentialists. Whatever gave us an amusing time, we did.’
It’s amusing too, at this distance in time, that Woody Allen’s preoccupations and cinematic allegiances didn’t change much with the switch to a different locale and mood. Sonja and Natasha go into a two-face Persona composition near the end and the very last shot of Love and Death nods to The Seventh Seal: the killed-by-firing-squad Boris and the shroud-clad, sickle-wielding figure of Death (who appears regularly throughout and is voiced by Norman Rose) gradually disappear in a receding pas de deux down an avenue of trees. This routine, like the rest of the film, is scored by Prokofiev – mainly ‘Troika’ from the Lieutenant Kije suite, one of the jolliest pieces of music I know.
12 January 2012
