Love and Death
Composite Score: 85.77
Starring: Woody Allen, Diane Keaton, Lloyd Batista, Yves Brainville, Brian Coburn, Henri Coutet, Henri Czarniak, Despo Diamantidou, Olga Georges-Picot, Harold Gould, and James Tolkan
Director: Woody Allen
Writer: Woody Allen
Genres: Comedy, War, History, Romance
MPAA Rating: PG
Box Office: $20.12 million worldwide
Why should you Watch This Film?
Love and Death is Woody Allen’s sixth film as a writer/director, this one following a man and woman living in czarist Russia during the Napoleonic era and their ill-fated attempts to better their circumstances and shirk their duties. The film stars Allen in the leading role of Boris and Diane Keaton opposite him as Sonja. Boris is in love with Sonja, but Sonja prefers his brother who is, in turn, engaged to another woman, driving all of them into situations that they’d rather not be in. As the film unfolds, Boris and Sonja cross paths many times as each of them comes into their own – Boris as an unintentional war hero and Sonja as the semi-disgraced widow of a herring factory owner – eventually entering into a less than loving marriage together and plotting to assassinate Napoleon. The film is Allen’s parody of Russian literature and eastern European film, containing a plethora of references to Ingmar Bergman, Andrei Tarkovsky, Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoy, complete with a soundtrack of some of Prokofiev’s more noteworthy music. In addition to its success at the Berlin Film Festival, the film has been heralded as one of Allen’s best films and certainly one of his funniest.
Why shouldn’t you Watch This Film?
What I hate about Woody Allen films is how much they really are right up my alley because they’re all forever stained with the funk of Woody Allen. This really is a fun parody film full of slapstick, wit, and referential humor to keep any audience fully engaged and laughing, but at the same time it’s a film made by and starring Woody Allen who is a certified Hollywood skeezer. Why couldn’t he just have not groomed his wife’s adopted daughter? It would all be so much better and easier to recommend his films, which really are brilliantly written and usually, especially in the case of Love and Death, well-produced. I will say, on a more subjective note, that a lot of the humor in this film does rely somewhat on a knowledge of at least something of the aforementioned authors and filmmakers and/or the geopolitical history of the Napoleonic era. Not every joke draws from that very specific well, but enough do to make it a film that will certainly go further with some viewers than with others, so I thought I should make you aware of it going in.
So wait, why should you Watch This Film?
Allen’s later indiscretions notwithstanding (and I really don’t want to ignore, forgive, or gloss over those), he really has given audiences a fun film with Love and Death. The fascinating juxtaposition of his brand of humor – that slapstick homage to Keaton and Chaplin combined with the innuendos of the Marx Brothers and a philosophical absurdism all his own – with the settings, costumes, and characters of a period drama make for a truly entertaining piece of cinema. It’s a film that’s aged well (again, if you discount Allen himself, which I don’t commend at all) thanks to its fairly simple story that relies much more on the humor and characters themselves to carry it. Allen does a solid job playing his usual self-deprecating self as Boris, delivering his lines with the right amount of deadpan to keep the audience chuckling. It’s really Keaton opposite him that does the true lifting of the film, though, playing Sonja in a near-anachronistic fashion that only serves to elevate the film’s satire. Her confidence, sexuality, and comedic timing make for the perfect leading lady for this film, earning plenty of hearty laughs as she rebounds effortlessly from tragedy to tragedy.
The way that Woody Allen interposes his own style within the world and expectations of Russian period dramas and the other influences of Eastern Europe feels so seamless and hilarious that the placement of Love and Death among the Greatest Films of All Time feels more fitting than just about any other film from the writer/director. The man himself might be one of the more egregious examples of celebrity abuse of power, and the humor does rely heavily on some audience foreknowledge of the subject matter, but the film itself is so excellent that I can’t in good conscience recommend skipping it entirely. You can currently stream it for free on Amazon Prime Video or, my personal recommendation, via Hoopla with a valid library card if you’d like to check it out.
