Not aged well. Not a high brow movie but a thoughtful and interesting one aesthetically.

Rating: 4/10 (4 October 2019)

Maybe one day when I have a lot more life experience I will rewatch this and think "Wow! this is so clever and deft and assessing modern relationships and is a hilarious bouquet of daring narrative techniques".
But for now I am very unimpressed by the minimalist approach. By this I mean two things: the very laisszez fair approach to visualization with a lot of long takes and static cameras and also the simple narrative in which rather than a linear story we get a collage of episodes that illustrate this sometimes passionate, sometimes floundering romance.
The crux of the problem is no interesting characters or intrigue to really get us started. They're in a relationship from the beginning; there's no meetcute or even a meet-painful to subvert that trope. I guess Allen was trying to give us a sort of anti-romance, the thing "The Break-up" should have been.
But although I'm a big cheerleader for Allen's vision of the hypochondrical, self-hating New Yorker, he simply hasn't much going for him with the context provided. Annie herself basically has no personality asides old fashioned sweet girliness. Yeah, she wears a suit and she looks fabulous. But it just seems arbitrary.
The episodes themselves are just mundane. They aren't gags, they're just bland slice of life in that unhappy medium between being funny or being poignant. They're neither.
The surrealist gags are sort of interesting but they get old really quickly because they are more gimmicky than clever. To give a couple of examples: at one point they converse and we get subtitles. But these subtitles do not convey the subtext of what they're saying, they just give inner thoughts therefore totally missing the translation element I was expecting. At another point we get an animated section where the sudden animation basically IS the joke.
I suppose this was sort of edgy in the '70s but now it just seems like the same tropes that are the bread and butter in modern relationship humour.
The "innovations" like turning directly to the camera are also just gimmicks that aren't used to any effect. Bug Bunny did that and he did it in a funny way.
In fits and starts I sort of want to like it. It's not an obnoxious movie and it comes from a good place creatively. Allen and Keaton play their parts impeccably even if the script is never naturalistic or stylized enough for them to ever do much with it.
The exact romance depicted is agreeable. It neither burns bright or hot but is a convincing meeting of two different types of people having a believable connection even if it isn't a viable one. I like the lobster motif. I did not laugh once.
I would recommend "Crimes and Misdemeanours" or "Whatever Works" above this movie if you're curious about Woody Allen and, like me, you don't find "relatable" humor that funny.
It isn't a high brow movie, it just stepped out of the mould for a bit.