It Begins Now

Addressing the camera, speaking as a person his own age (fortyish), with the same experience (a Jewish comedian from Brooklyn), preoccupations (Bergman, Nazis, the Knicks, death), and ambitions (to dramatize his love life), Woody Allen created, in “Annie Hall,” from 1977, a signal work of first-person cinematic modernism. (Its weeklong run at Film Forum begins on June 22.) With a panoply of effects—including constant frame-breaking asides, split screens, superimpositions, flashbacks within flashbacks, an animated sequence, and the deus-ex-machina deployment of Marshall McLuhan—Allen joins the Catskills tummler’s anything-for-a-laugh antics with a Eurocentric art-house self-awareness and a psychoanalytic obsession in baring his sexual desires and frustrations, romantic disasters, and neurotic inhibitions. His eruptive display of the New York Jewish voice is a film counterpart to “Portnoy’s Complaint,” but one that’s laced with a strain of bromance: Allen’s alter ego, Alvy Singer, and his lifelong best friend, Rob (Tony Roberts), touchingly call each other Max and gibe with an intimacy that no woman can penetrate. ♦