Life may be a vale of tears, but with Woody Allen around, all is not mourning and weeping. In Annie Hall, Allen again writes, directs and stars with Diane Keaton in a remarkable recreation of a spent love affair, which is both sad and hysterically funny. There is a great deal of hurt within the film, but the raw edges have been sutured by Allen's […] bountiful comedy: it has us in stitches.
Allen's most closely focused and daring film to date, it opens without background music with the comedian against a blank screen telling a couple of familiar jokes that are the key to the mood of the film. The narrative darts about in time, interrupts itself to discuss with the camera and (with double imaging) with the characters the course of an affair doomed from the start by the self-absorbed neuroses of the people – he a New York Jewish comic called Alvy Singer, she (Annie Hall) a singer with hang-ups. Since the Allen-Keaton partnership has ended in fact as well as film, some of this is close to home: no wonder it is subtitled "a nervous romance".
It is an A La Recherche du Temps Brooklyn: the camera revisits the comedian's home under a rollercoaster catching the small, poker-faced, bespectacled young Singer stonily trying to sip a trembling bowl of soup, staring down his first shrink, muttering a despairing "Jeez" at the antics of avuncular adults. The adult Singer pops in to join his former self and his former classmates to find out what they are doing now: one nine-year-old moppet with braces on her teeth and glasses primly announces that she's "into leather."
The film is studded with merciless pokes at the pseuds and neurotics and self-deceivers who enrich New York. […] Nor does Singer/Allen spare himself: he lampoons his Jewishness and a long passage in which he and Annie nervously chat each other up, aimlessly discussing the aesthetic principles of photography, is counterpointed with subtitles which delicately elucidate what's really going on: "I hope" thinks the girl "that he doesn't turn out to be a shmuck like all the others." He does. So does she.
A film which sticks close to the cutting edge of love, and darts about daringly trying to make philosophical sense of it, is bound to be flawed. This one is, because Allen tried to do in 93 minutes what Proust needed 11 volumes for: to resolve life, love and the passing of both. But then, if Proust had been accused of mental masturbation he would have answered: "Don't knock masturbation. Remember, it's sex with someone you really love."
