Annie Hall (1977)

Directed by: Woody Allen | 93 minutes | comedy, romance | Actors: Woody Allen, Diane Keaton, Tony Roberts, Carol Kane, Paul Simon, Shelley Duvall, Janet Margolin, Colleen Dewhurst, Christopher Walken, Donald Symington, Helen Ludlam, Mordecai Lawner, Joan Neuman, Jonathan Munk, Ruth Volner

At first glance a tiny, sweet, romantic comedy with Woody Allen’s well-known barrage of one-liners and phobias, but there is so much to recognize in ‘Annie Hall’. Name another movie that influenced both “When Harry Met Sally” and “Donnie Darko.” The first film in pretty much everything and the last one in the psychiatrist scenes for sure.

Allen’s genius for observing and analyzing people comes into its own in his big breakthrough film, set at the fast pace of the neurotic metropolis of New York. And dated? When husband and wife meet, Allen begins with pointless conversation and ends in bed. Has so much changed in thirty years? In fact, Allen’s psychologization is ubiquitous in twenty-first-century man.

With ‘Annie Hall’, the director shows himself to be a master at telling a story efficiently and original – the rise and fall of a love relationship – by occasionally having his alter ego Alvy Singer turn to the camera, passers-by on the street to to ask for comment and to literally take Annie Hall – the nickname and mother’s name of interpreter Diane Keaton, with whom Allen had a relationship in 1977 – into his past. Works great in a genre that could use a different approach. Alvy and Annie are two chaotic people who, despite their plotless relationship, are very comfortable with each other, because people just don’t like being alone and are difficult to bond, those kinds of – apparent – contradictions. Of course: he likes Nazi movies and she doesn’t; she’s afraid of spiders, and Allen’s characters are able to inflate these kinds of details to enormous proportions, but at the same time they show us the power and fallibility of love, without making it sentimental.

Sentimentality is the natural enemy of humor and humor is the most important characteristic of Allen films. It is abundantly present in ‘Annie Hall’, but mostly entertaining and stimulating. Anyone who thinks the fact that hypochondriac Alvy grew up in a house below the Coney Island roller coaster is lame will probably never fall for Woody Allen’s humor; anyone who becomes neurotic from the speech waterfall is probably too happy to have to learn anything from his films. And what do you learn from ‘Annie Hall’? Something about using the safe word ‘la-di-da’ in conversations (could have been in ‘Seinfeld’); that masturbation is sex with someone you love. Light-hearted tidbits, but only in a perfect world would they be superfluous; that Diane Keaton overacts out of apparent infatuation is the twist of fate that can make the products of a control freak like Woody Allen so charmingly imperfect.