"Write about what you know"

Rating: 10/10 (16 December 2008)

"Write about what you know", or so they say. In "Annie Hall", one of Woody Allen's first films, we can sense the application of that common phrase. Allen and Marshall Brickman wrote the script of the movie, but we can never imagine Brickman's collaboration or influence. I say this meaning no disrespect, but Woody is the man we've always seen; the beautiful neurotic we've learned to love and recognize in many characters he never even played (Mia Farrow's character in "The Purple Rose of Cairo" or Jason Biggs' in "Anything Else", to put to examples distant in time). And that man is the same Alvy Singer, the protagonist of this movie, to whom Allison (Carol Kane) says: "You're cute".
And how can he not be? A comedian who divides life between the miserable and the horrible, Alvy looks at the camera and talks to us, wondering why Annie (Diane Keaton) left him; trying to understand what he did wrong. So he takes us through their relationship, and we learn that once he tells Annie about his division of life: "You should be happy that you're miserable". We learn about Annie and about him, but mostly about him, and we instantly understand what went wrong. There are a million ways to look at it, but Alvy, an irreparable egocentric, passed his depressive view of life to Annie: he bought her books about death, told her to visit an analyst, shut down her social life little by little.
But that's not the point, because Alvy we'll never admit it, and he'll never understand. His prejudiced view of everything, his need to always teach the rest something and the thought that he knows better will never change. He tries hard to show us his childhood, which he revisits once in a while as if he was daydreaming-by himself, with Annie or with his best friend Rob (Tony Roberts)-, his previous relationships and a mix of what he did as a comedian in the past and what he does now. In a monstrous editing work by Wendy Greene Bricmont and Ralph Rosenblum, we share Alvy's disappointment in life. He looks at the camera in the middle of conversations so he can analyze a situation, and stops people in the middle of the street to look for solutions.
As I already said, it's in vain; and maybe Alvy's relationship with Annie was doomed from the beginning. We also get a look at Annie's previous relationships and we can understand what drove her to a man like Alvy (yes, he's a man in his forties, who tells us about being in the middle of a life crisis as he looks for explanations to what occurred to him). So if everything was lost, what is it there to find? Well, contradictorily, everything.
I'll tell you...The first encounter they both share, which involves a whole afternoon, is a lesson of cinema; of character creation and writing in a genre that exists no more. The romantic comedy we watch today and that I love is so different from this fantastic piece that shares its genre definition, that if you walked today into "Annie Hall" and they told you what kind of movie it is, you'd come out of the theater saying you've been fooled.
The psychological reflections, the moments of quiet observation, the scary plausibility of the performances and the risk of making something so seemingly autobiographical (that makes you hate and love a character/human being in different moments of the ride) and re- declaring it again inside of it make "Annie Hall" the masterpiece it is. And it's also a masterpiece because it's the essence of a cinema that has disappeared or is at least in extinction, and that Woody Allen tried to keep alive.
Never taking the easy way out, always in the search of an unpredictable surprise, the writer/director bet on characters, writing about what he knew, knowing that, that way, he could never go wrong. And he never did.