Woody Allen’s Love and Death is a funny, poignant satire of classic Russian literature, values, and manners, in which he and Diane Keatin render stellar performances.
Grade: B+ (**** out of *****)
In this 1975 comedy, Allen’s targets and references include the great novelists Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, as well as filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, and other figures.
The dialogue and scenarios parody Russian novels, particularly those by Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, such as The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, The Gambler, The Idiot and War and Peace. This includes a dialogue between Boris and his father in which each line alludes to, or is composed entirely of, Dostoyevsky titles.
The movie was made after “Sleeper” and before “Annie Hall,” Allen’s breakthrough film, which gained him the acceptance of mainstream audiences—and the 1977 Oscars for Best Picture and Original Screenplay; Diane Keaton won Best Actress.
Allen plays Boris, a 19th century Russian who falls in love with his distant (and married) cousin Sonja (Diane Keaton). Recruited into service with the Russian army during the Napoleon Wars, Boris accidentally becomes a hero. Later on, with his ego inflated, he engages in and wins a duel against a cuckolded husband (Harold Gould).
Boris returns to Sonja, hoping to settle down, but in his absence, Sonja has become politicized and she is now inflamed with patriotic fervor. To that extent, she asks Boris to join a plot aiming at killing Napoleon.
Still influenecd then by the comedies of the Marx brothers and the deivery style of Bob Hope, “Love and Death” contains many mocking (but also serious or semi-serious) allusions to more substantial intellectual and philosophical ideas (including some inspired by Ingmar Bergman).
Allen’s film is self-conscious and self-reflexive, and as such, contains many deliberate anachronisms, manifest in the monologues and dialogue, and/or references to works of literature and art.
As always in this Allen era, there are at least a dozen funny one-liners. Thus, when congratulated for his lovemaking, Boris replies nonchalantly, “I practice a lot when I’m alone.” (Many Allen films makes explicit references to masturbation). Allen-Boris addresses the audience directly. Talking t the camera, he say at one point: “There are some things worse than death, like if you’ve ever spent an evening with an insurance salesman.”
The music of the noted Sergey Prokofiev contributes to establishing the (pseudo) Russian mood of “Love and Death.” Prokofiev’s “Troika” from the “Lieutenant Kijé Suite” is playingf during the film’s opening and closing credits.
Allen shot the film in France and Hungary, where he had to content with unfavorable weather, spoiled negatives, food poisoning, physical injuries and communication difficulties, vowing to never shoot another film outside the US again (He later did, nonetheless, in Paris, Spain and Italy).
Somehow, miraculously, Allen succeeds in planting his neurotic Jewish persona into Tolstoy and others, resulting in his funniest picture to date, one that relies on slapstick ingenuity as well as literary probe into more serious issues.
Structurally loose yet thematically grounded, Love and Death was consistently delightful, and it’s notable for offering Diane Keaton the first major role in an Allen film, in which she functioned as more than his foil.
However, it would be in Allen’s next film, the 1977 Annie Hall, that Keaton would play the central titular role, for which she would win her first (and only, to date) her Best Actress Oscar.
Critical Status:
At the 1975 Berlin Film Fest, the film won the Silver Bear for outstanding artistic contribution.
In 2008, in a poll held by Empire magazine, the film was voted as the 301st greatest film out of a list of 500. In October 2013, the film was voted by the Guardian readers as Allen’ seventh-best film.
Critically acclaimed, Love and Death was hugely [popular at the box-office, grossing $20.1 million in America.
