La-Di-Da, La-Di-Da, La La

Rating: 10/10 (20 October 2010)

Annie invites Alvy up to her apartment for the first time. They have a drink and chat. Subtitles tell us what each person's thinking throughout. We see that what they're saying is not what they're thinking. More particularly, because they're essentially preoccupied with impressing each other and forming a new relationship, we see a dialogue wherein they're both too engrossed in assessing their own performance to totally partake. They censure what they're saying as they're saying it, and accordingly, their actual interaction becomes practically hollow. What makes this scene hilarious is the incongruity between what both people are saying and what they're thinking. Normally, we don't get such an advantaged spy-hole on a conversation. And watching this scene, we become conscious that these discrepancies between thought and speech surface along with the prospect of romance. The deeper connotation's that romantic relationships are somehow very different from friendly ones, that romantic ones characteristically involve deception on some level.
Alvy ruminates on his elementary school days, where there's an off-the-wall incorporation of the present with the past. We hear him narrate about his class as we watch the action. At some point though, the adult Alvy steps into the scene, intermingles with the children and teacher of his past, who then act like they're living in the present along with him. The wittiness here's rooted in the peculiar temporal absurdities regarding him and his classmates, who are hilariously children and adults simultaneously. And it nurtures vital issues about the connection between our childhood and adult actions, between genetics and culture in shaping behavior. When we hear the kids talking about what they've become as grown-ups, we instantly start to laugh in wonder at how they got from this to that. How do innocent seven-year-old children, with like cultural backgrounds, grow up to be so different from each other? What inborn temperaments and fusion of occurrences in their lives led to such wide-ranging identities? Allen proposes no answers for these questions, but he undoubtedly instills these uncertainties. They encompass the background feel for the rest of the film. To be sure, one of the key ideas of Annie Hall is our powerlessness to ever get a thorough grasp of how and why people change. Periodically, we're offered self-spoofing philosophical masturbation about this multifaceted subject, but never are we given an ultimate resolution of it. The insinuation's that we may never have a complete one.
Like Seinfeld, Annie Hall taps reflexive humor from everyday occasions: quarrelling about whether it's tolerable to enter a movie after it's begun; withstanding tedious cocktail parties. I can conceive of George relating to Alvy's slant on romance: He doesn't want a woman who'd want him. And mightn't Kramer have been disheartened as a kid over the expansion of the universe? Why does dialogue always seem more real in Woody Allen films? Because he doesn't begin conversations with someone arriving, end with them leaving, transposing trite formula onto an otherwise good story. Instead, it works to conceive variations, opening scenes in the middle of things, ending dialogues without prolonging them, without people straining to bring things to a finish. He keeps characters' words from delineating the sense of opening and closure. As well, many comedians kill jokes by giving too much or little information that gives us our grasp, or by either hastening or prolonging the pace of the information delivery. Consciously setting us up to laugh needs a sharp familiarity with a scenario, including delicate particulars about the vibes and expectations of an audience, then making them abruptly conscious of an unanticipated change, such that some initial notions about the situation are spontaneously changed.
Slimly built, anxious, rambling, bespectacled, wildly gesturing, highly strung, and a ceaseless wit, Woody as an actor is both familiar and personal, and with her ditzy proclivity for men's clothing, WASPy background and airy exhortations, fish-in-the-Manhattan-sea Annie is the spot-on counterpoint to Alvy's Jewish NYC valetudinarian. Though she's remembered more for her fickle naivete, it's Annie's obscurely morose tendencies---she requires pot to take pleasure in sex, her analyst proposes five sessions a week---that gives her profundity. And what gets us stuck on her is the breezy sweetness, idiosyncratic beauty and natural comic timing of Keaton herself. Whether she's playing herself or a variation on herself or what Woody envisioned, it's all her. Even that iconic look. And yet the word I believe best describes her performance is effortless. She simply doesn't hide her reactions, doesn't seem to have a fixed Method-style concentration on character, motivation. She's just herself in 1977.
Allen uses broad comedy, breaking the fourth wall and even a cartoon sequence to break comic distance and allow us to see from Alvy's point-of-view. It's an unassumingly compelling vehicle for imparting philosophically valuable ideas, highlighting unanticipated incongruities in each scene, using them to reap fresh thematic understanding. Joking's not subject to the same criticism as other exchange of ideas, and this makes it viable to persuade the audience to consider thoughtful subjects generally not dealt with. In so many scenes, nearly every one, Allen draws on absurdist humor straightforwardly to broach fascinating theoretical doubts, and gets the audience to contemplate them. Indeed, it's repeatedly the case that the raising of such questions is a central part of the film's subject matter.
Creating a stream-of-consciousness narrative, Allen uses an intellectual style of editing, but also a buildup of cutting based on the mind's distortion of time, multifaceted visual arrangements and stage-managed chronological length of shots to fuse the film's effect on us for a more concentrated, conceptual effect than eliciting our most straightforward, reactive sleepwalk through a standard formula. At the end, we're left with more questions about subjects like love than we had at the start of the film. It looks to be Allen's aim to point up that there are no simple answers to particular crucial questions about life, to cultivate our understanding of the complexities involved in grasping such complicated matters.