Allen's love affair with New York

Rating: Null/10 (30 August 2001)

This was Allen's first popular success and the first of a series of films that used what seems to be autobiographical material to dissect New York angst. Annie Hall seems to be a comparatively straightforward account of Allen's affair with Diane Keaton, who plays the part of Annie Hall in the film.
Both main characters comment on the relationship by directly addressing the camera or by stepping out of their bodies and observing themselves or, at the beginning of the relationship when they are trying to impress each other, by using subtitles to reveal what they are really thinking while we hear them saying something completely different.
Keaton's playing is initially irritating although, when the film was first released audiences were amused by her vacant manner, her erratic dress sense and her habit of trailing off sentences with `...oh well, lah de dah'. Her later scenes after her transformation are more successful.

Jeff Goldblum has one line, in what must have been his first film appearance. Sigourney Weaver also appears as `Woman in cinema queue', but I must have blinked because I did not see her. Marshall MacLuhan, the media guru also appears as himself. Paul Simon has an amusing cameo as an oleaginous Californian who lures Keaton to California. In fact Allen is most venomous when he is depicting California and Californians. His identification with New York is total. Annie Hall says `Alvie is like New York: he is an island'. In retrospect this film can be seen as marking the end of Allen's slapstick period and the beginning of his long series of films that depict his love affair with New York, and, by implication, with himself.