Love and Death
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Love and Death is a 1975 comedy by Woody Allen. Starring Woody Allen and Diane Keaton, Love and Death is a satirical take on Russian epic novels. Coming in between Sleeper and Annie Hall, Love and Death is in many respects an artistic transition between the two. It is arguably the last of Allen's movies to be played purely for laughs. Keaton and Allen, as Sonja and Boris, Russians living during the Napoleonic Era, engage in mock-serious philosophical debates. He is to have said that this is his personal favorite film of his, also his most personal.
Style
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. The use of Prokofiev for the soundtrack adds to the Russian flavor of the film. This includes a dialogue between Boris and his father conducted entirely by way of Dostoevsky titles. Prokofiev's Troika from the Lieutenant Kije Suite is featured prominently, for the film's opening and closing credits, and in selected scenes in the film when a "bouncy" theme is called for.
Some of the humour is straightforward; other jokes rely on the viewer's awareness of then au courant European cinema. For example, the final shot of Keaton is a reference to Ingmar Bergman's Persona, the sequence with the stone lions is a parody of Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin and the plotline involving the Countess, her jealous lover and his duel-gone-awry with Allen's character is an homage to Bergman's Smiles of a Summer Night. Bergman's The Seventh Seal is quoted all throughout, and the Totentantz at the end is lifted entirely.
Plot summary
When Napoleon advances to invade the Russian Empire during the Napoleonic wars, Boris Grushenko (Allen), a coward and pacifist scholar, is forced to enlist in the Russian Army, desperate and disappointed hearing the news that his cousin Sonja (Keaton) is to wed a herring merchant. He inadvertently captures a group of enemy soldiers, but to no avail, as the French army reaches Moscow immediately afterward. He returns and marries the recently-widowed Sonja (who really does not want to marry Boris, but promises him she will when she thinks he is about to be killed in a duel), a marriage filled with philosophical debates, and no money. Boris thinks that the French invasion of Moscow should put an end to the war. His narcissistic wife, angered that the invasion will interfere with their plans to start a family that year, conceives a plot to assassinate Napoleon at his quarters. Boris and Sonja debate the matter with some degree of philosophical double-talk, and Boris reluctantly goes along with it. Miraculously (or perhaps not), Sonja escapes arrest while Boris is not so lucky.
Along the way, Allen brings in some out-of-context gags:
- In a brief interlude Boris works as a struggling poet, reading from a poem he eventually wads up and throws out he says, "I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas," a quote lifted from T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." ("Too sentimental," Boris decides as he throws out the poem.)
- Allen retains his trademark glasses despite their anachronistic absurdity; at one point Boris says to Sonja after a diatribe filled with exasperation and self-loathing, "Do you think God wears glasses???" and she replies, "Not with those frames!"
- A vendor, complete with New York accent and attired is if he were at a ballpark, is selling "red hots" to spectators during a battle. One spectator apparently offers him a large-denomination currency, and he remarks, "Hey, you got anything smaller? I just started!"
- A black Drill Sergeant puts Boris through his paces. "You LOVE Russia, don't you?" "Yes sir!" "I can't hear you!" "YES SIR!"
- The motion picture had not been invented yet so the Russian Army stages a short "Hygiene Play" on the dangers of venereal disease, after which Boris "reviews" the 30-second play in the verbiage of a modern theater critic.
- Boris speaks to the audience: "There are some things worse than death. If you've ever spent an evening with an insurance salesman, I'm sure you know what I mean!"
- "My brother was killed in the line of duty; bayoneted to death by a Polish conscientious objector!"
External links
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