Annie Hall

Dir: Woody Allen

1977

****

Annie Hall is frequently regarded as one of Woody Allen's best films, however, Allen has been often quoted in interviews saying that he doesn't think very highly of it, only being able to see how much it doesn't live up to what he really wanted it to be. Personally I admire it for all of the ground it breaks and I do quite like the story. I’m drawn to the nostalgia that surrounds it and the many conversations I’ve had about it at film school and since. However, it is far from my favourite Woody Allen film, even though it features many of my favourite Woody Allen moments. It was the first of many collaborations between Allen and cinematographer Gordon Willis, it was a love letter to New York in the 1970’s and the film where Allen cemented himself as a character, inventing his now infamous persona, mixing his Jewish identity, psycoanalysis, existential anxiety and failed love life in the form of celebration, the celebration focused on his love of film and home town of New York. The idea for what would become Annie Hall was developed as Allen walked around New York City with co-writer Marshall Brickman. The pair discussed the project on alternative days, sometimes becoming frustrated and rejecting the idea. Allen wrote a first draft of a screenplay within a four-day period, sending it to Brickman to make alterations. According to Brickman, this draft centered on a man in his forties, someone whose life consisted "of several strands. One was a relationship with a young woman, another was a concern with the banality of the life that we all live, and a third an obsession with proving himself and testing himself to find out what kind of character he had. Allen himself turned forty in 1975, and Brickman suggests that "advancing age" and "worries about death" had influenced Allen's philosophical, personal approach to complement his "commercial side". Allen made the conscious decision to "sacrifice some of the laughs for a story about human beings". He recognized that for the first time he had the courage to abandon the safety of complete broad comedy and had the will to produce a film of deeper meaning which would be a nourishing experience for the audience. He was also influenced by Federico Fellini's 1963 comedy-drama 8½, created at a similar personal turning point, and similarly colored by each director's psychoanalysis. Annie Hall uses both therapy and analysis for comic effect. It’s a story about memory and retrospection, which dramatises a return via narrative desire to the repressed and the unconscious in a manner similar to psychoanalysis. It’s a self-conscious assertion of how narrative desire and humor interact to reform ideas and perceptions and Allen's deployment of Freudian concepts and humor forms a pattern of skepticism toward surface meaning that compels further interpretation. Freud is all over Annie Hall. Several devices in the film, particularly the scene with the subtitles which reveal Annie's and Alvy's thoughts, extend and reinforce Annie Hall 's winsome ethos of plain-dealing and ingenuousness. The film is full of antimimetic emblems, my favourite being Marshall McLuhan’s cameo appearance, which provides unexpected quirky humor and that the disparity between mental projections of reality and actuality is what is driving the film. Federico Fellini and Luis Buñuel were asked to play this part first but only McLuhan was available, which wasn’t a bad thing as his work on media theory made for a more interesting discussion than talking with Fellini and Buñuel about their films would have been (although my inner cinephile wishes they had been available). These self-reflective cinematic devices intelligently dramatize the difference between surface and substance, with visual emblems incessantly distilling the distinction between the world mentally constructed and reality. It’s where modernism infiltrated Hollywood to the point where it couldn’t go back and be what it once was. Annie Hall is an unresolved examination of the process of human interaction and interpersonal communication which immediately establishes a self-referential stance that invites the spectator to read the narrative as something other than a sequential development toward some transcendent truth. Woody Allen’s character, who is essentially Woody Allen himself, is effected by basic problems first experienced as a child (as seen in flashbacks, some of which are set in a therapist's office with his mother. These problems such as poverty, envy, inadequacy and discordant parents are masked by a supposed existential crisis. It’s basically what you either love or hate about Woody Allen’s films. The film is framed through Alvy's experiences. What we know about Annie and about the relationship comes filtered through Alvy, an intrusive narrator capable of halting the narrative and stepping out from it in order to entreat the audience's interpretative favor. The protagonist is blurred with past and future protagonists as well as with Allen himself, so the audiences reaction depends on whether we are most responsive to the director's or the character's framing of events. This is the answer as to whether Brickman and Allen sent the screenplay back and forth until they were ready to ask United Artists for $4 million. Many elements from the early drafts did not survive. It was originally a drama centered on a murder mystery with a comic and romantic subplot. According to Allen, the murder occurred after a scene that remains in the film, the sequence in which Annie and Alvy miss the Ingmar Bergman film Face to Face. Although they decided to drop the murder plot, Allen and Brickman made a murder mystery many years later: 1993's Manhattan Murder Mystery, also starring Diane Keaton. The draft that Allen presented to the film's editor, Ralph Rosenblum, concluded with the words, "ending to be shot." Allen suggested Anhedonia, a term for the inability to experience pleasure, as a working title and Brickman suggested alternatives including It Had to Be Jew, Rollercoaster Named Desire and Me and My Goy. An advertising agency, hired by United Artists, embraced Allen's choice of an obscure word by suggesting the studio take out newspaper advertisements that looked like fake tabloid headlines such as "Anhedonia Strikes Cleveland!". However, Allen experimented with several titles over five test screenings, including Anxiety and Annie and Alvy, before settling on Annie Hall. Annie Hall was written specifically for Diane Keaton (Annie being short for Diane and Hall being her maiden name) but the film is as much a love song to New York City as it is to the character. Allen would declare his love for Manhattan many times again, particularly in films like Manhattan and Hannah and Her Sisters. I think this is what I like about the film more than anything, Allen’s passions on show and honoured with plenty of heart. I also admire its honesty and wonderful writing, the modern techniques and of course Diane Keaton. It has a couple of great lines, many now infamous and all having the desired effect. It has never been one of my favourite movies or even my favourite Allen movie but I love the scene where Annie and Alvy are in a line for The Sorrow and the Pity and overhear another man deriding the work of Federico Fellini and Marshall McLuhan. The real Marshall McLuhan himself then steps in at Alvy's invitation to criticize the man's comprehension. It appeals to me on so many levels and I bet there are countless film makers who hate Woody Allen for thinking of it before they did. It’s not completely to my tastes but I can’t deny its something of a modernist masterpiece.