Woody Allen Week: Love and Death (1975)

2 years ago

Woody Allen Week: Love and Death (1975)

YOU LOVE RUSSIA, DON’T YOU?

by Karina Wolf

Love and Death could only have been made by an autodidact. The movie is in awe of literature but toys with high seriousness. Woody Allen wrote it after Sleeper and concurrently with the script that would become Annie Hall. At the time, Allen wanted to try something new with comedy. Annie Hall was character driven: you care about the people, as Allen told Eric Lax, and are engaged by the story even when jokes temporarily recede.

It’s true, I suppose, that watching Love and Death you don’t worry about the fate of the characters or the success of their plans. Love and Death, though, is the more flamboyant scenario, at once highly absurd and absurdly intellectual. In it, Allen knits together his affection for S.J. Perelman and Bob Hope, for physical comedy and for puns. The set ups may be Scandinavian but the resolutions are pure Borscht belt. The movie was a popular success, somewhat astoundingly, considering that its dialogue was inspired by the mystic Gurdjieff. But words are also Allen’s genius: it’s not just the antics (his ‘jejune-osity’) that make you laugh.

The movie has a novel’s circular structure: Allen’s character Boris is due to be executed at 6 a.m. the following morning (‘I was supposed to go at five o’clock, but I have a smart lawyer.’) and he looks back upon the events that led to his sentence. In the manner of Russian novels, the film introduces a host of extended family and servants. The initial conflict, in which Boris’ affection for his cousin Sonja is thwarted by her love for his brother Ivan, is replaced by global conflict. Napoleon’s troops head for Russia and Boris is sent off to the front, where he becomes an inadvertent hero. When he and Sonja are threatened by Napoleon’s forces a second time, they decide to execute the French leader by impersonating the emperor’s ally, Don Francisco of Spain.

This is The Marx Brothers’ War and Peace – Allen stuns your logical mind with syllogisms so that your inner child can enjoy pure silliness: the cartoonish violence, the pastiche of contemporary films (the black drill sergeant shouts, “You love Russia, don’t you?”), and a host of other anachronisms.

In fact, it seems beside the point to decipher why things are funny in Love and Death: comic scenes pulse because of a pleasing, clever and unexpected repayment of expectation. My favorite lines of dialogue are recurring bouts of Aristotelian logic, misapplied hilariously.

(a) Socrates is a man.

(b) All men are mortal.

(c) All men are Socrates.

That means all men are homosexuals.

I’m not a homosexual.

Once, some Cossacks whistled at me.

I happen to have the kind of body that excites both persuasions.    But, you know, some men are heterosexual,

and some men are bisexual, and some men don’t think about sex at all. They become lawyers.

Woody Allen is always at his best when he’s irreverent: his dramas improve when he plays the clown; his comedies, especially this one, provoke laughs and even joy. The actor-director has said that realistically he can only play a low-life or an intellectual—an assessment that is not based on modesty, I think, but on an appraisal of his origins. If Allen had not possessed a genius for jokes, the Brooklyn native could have escaped a working class life only through education. As it was, Allen was expelled from NYU but succeeded onscreen. His continuing study – the breadth of his reading, the philosophic interrogations — is reflected in the development of his films.

In his hands, comedy is profound. Take one of Sonja’s final scenes as she consoles a friend:

To love is to suffer.

To avoid suffering, one must not love.

But then one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer.

Not to love is to suffer. To suffer is to suffer.

To be happy is to love.

To be happy, then, is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be unhappy one must love,

or love to suffer, or suffer from too much happiness… I hope you’re getting this down.

Love and Death, in the most whimsical way, reflects Allen’s career-long concerns: Can pleasure ever be more than fleeting? Can man’s desires be ruled by reason? Is there a god? Does the universe have a moral structure? What is the purpose of existence?

It’s an impossible task to write about a successful Woody Allen comedy, particularly one as potent as Love and Death: the temptation is to behave like Chris Farley in that SNL skit in which the anxious talk show host summarizes favorite scenes and then says, “That was so awesome.” Words will never equal the experience, so go and watch Love and Death.

Karina Wolf is a writer living in New York City. She has previously written about The Royal Tenenbaums and Spellbound in these pages. She tumbls here.