ANNIE HALL

LOOK, I’M WOODY. HOWDY, HOWDY, HOWDY.

Starring Woody Allen and Diane Keaton

Trailer

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  The stick-out then, the show-off. When he’s carted into his grave and the sands of an uncaring future-desert swarm over his earth and memory, when the last tombs of emperors a thousand years hence have caved in and bubbled under the fissures of a collapsing solar system, there’ll still be someone out there with a DVD of Woody Allen’s first ‘grown up’ one, and they’ll still think the bit with the lobsters is cute. Often chucked about as the template for all modern romantic comedies, Annie Hall wins above everything else by simply nailing the first hurdle, the test that so many others have drastically fucked up since; it makes you care about both sides of the couple, it makes them real, interesting people with wants and needs and funny lines about living under rollercoasters. Time hasn’t ruined it, and if anything the string of no-hope copy works and lickspittles that have come along since have bolstered its greatness, an example of something done right that Allen has never really pulled off again. The jokes all work, the jumping about in time is inspired and every character leaves their mark, even Paul Simon’s hilariously drab and underplayed record producer and Shelly Duvall’s physically terrifying rock reporter. Everything clicks, but it clicks on the solid foundations of it’s central relationship; watching Allen and Keaton together is one of cinema’s greatest pleasures, and something that we should be grateful even happened a few times. He’s brilliant, as he often is, but she’s every bit his equal and frequently his better, giving Annie a humanity and humility that’s often lacking from his own neurotic personas. The subtitled scene on the rooftop is the standout, but anyone who’s ever sobbingly pounded their face into a pillow over another face will sympathise with Annie’s late-night spider call or the film’s central message of fleeting happiness. Despite it’s tangents into fantasy and fourth wall smacking the whole thing works so well because it’s real, because it expertly paints the early bliss, gradual decline and sad realizations of real life love, as well as the hope and happiness that you can draw from it. The style will fade, the revolutions in narrative already left to history’s dumpster, but the film will stand forever as a celluloid letter to love itself, just like Annie and Alvy will sit in each other’s memories, reading death books and laughing and picking lobsters off a kitchen floor.