Annie Hall (dir. Woody Allen, 1977) - Review

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As Annie Hall draws to a close, the audience sees a montage of the lead couple’s history together. Soundtracked by Diane Keaton warbling through ‘Seems Like Old Times’- a disembodied encore of one of the film’s rare moments of sincerity - shots of their past flash across the screen, stingingly and knowingly nostalgic. One of the first scenes to appear, the lobsters loose in the kitchen, is already iconic enough to merit parody within the movie. As the montage continues, the audience are reminded that they are seeing something iconic in the literal sense: imagined perfection distilled into visuals. The lobster gives way to cringeworthy memories of the relationship’s decline, moments as uncomfortable for the viewer as for the characters. But through the magic of cinematic editing- synonymous with the mental revision of the past by the Woody Allen/Alvy Singer protagonist- the flawed episodes transform into a curated, coherent vision.

In the closing montage, Allen reminds the viewer of the delicate balancing act between overthinking and mindlessness which characterises the human experience - and his performed construction of it, as director and quasi-protagonist. From the opening joke about life (’this food is terrible - yes, and the portions are so small!’) to the closing one about relationships (‘we all need the eggs’), Annie Hall is a paean to the irrational, frustrating joy of existence, and its contradictory yet complimentary extremes.

For Allen, mockery and appreciation are two sides of the same coin. The film is riddled with incompatible elements, enhanced by their contrasts and by the inevitability of their sundering. As neurotic comic Alvy Singer, Allen acts out a fictionalised version of his relationship with Diane Keaton’s ditzy Annie Hall; Keaton (Diane Hall by birth) provided the title for a film which had bounced between alternatives including ‘Anhedonia’ and ‘It Had to Be Jew’. This premise forces ‘real’ and fictional narratives into proximity and competition, from the uncredited cameo of Truman Capote as “the winner of the Truman Capote lookalike contest”, to the constant battering of the fourth wall with Allen’s direct-to-audience addresses.

Yet Allen’s mockeries of cinematic form make the audience regard the object with fresh appreciation. Much as the prevalent cynical humor of Allen’s narration, both as a character and as writer-director, enhances occasions where he doesn’t shy away from emotion, his jokes about the filmmaking process remind the viewer of the beauty in its ridiculous elements. The recurring gimmick of background extras ‘coming to life’, and responding to Singer/Allen’s faux-spontaneous questioning, pokes fun at the contrived nature of film, painting the medium as the indulgent fantasy of its creator.

Allen constantly reminds the viewer that they are living in his fantasy; acknowledgement or apologies for his self-indulgence really serve to invite the audience into knowing complicity, to share in the privileged vantage point of the filmmaker. With his addressees winked at, Allen can act out the daydreams of a middle-aged man without abashment, most obviously through the parade of beautiful younger women who line up to date him, including Shelley Duvall and Sigourney Weaver in her screen debut. Thus, when Duvall’s character Pam praises his prowess in bed, or Carol Kane, as Alvy’s first wife, goes weak at the knees and calls him “cute” upon being roundly negged, the audience can react with amusement rather than irritation; the film doesn’t actually require them to believe in these scenarios to carry the plot. By contrast, consider the crop of 2000s ‘late-night’ films in which a gorgeous woman in her early twenties falls in love with a middle-aged comedian, who inevitably happened to have a hand in production.

In another instance of cunning duplicity, Allen ropes the audience into shared mockery of pretentious film enthusiasts, whilst simultaneously flattering his-slash-their own pretensions. When his neighbour in the cinema queue pontificates loudly about Federico Fellini and Marshall McLuhan, Alvy first complains to the camera (“What do you do when you get stuck in a movie line with a guy like this behind you?”) then pulls the real McLuhan from behind a poster. When both Alvy and Allen put a fantasized rebuttal in McLuhan’s mouth, they ridicule the cinemagoer’s intellectual airs while affecting superior intellectual airs of their own, on the shared behalf of the audience member who smugly recognises the author of ‘the medium is the message’.

True to the spirit of its title character, Annie Hall is not a film to get bogged down in neurotic pseudo-intellectualism. Aside from a barrage of quotable one-liners - “don’t knock masturbation! It’s sex with someone I love!”- and a catalogue of future stars, including Christopher Walken and a woefully brief glimpse of Jeff Goldblum, it presses an argument for getting out of one’s own head and embracing life with all its confusion. At the end, even the neurotic Alvy must admit that “relationships (are) totally irrational and crazy and absurd”. But they’re also essential.