"Irrational, And Crazy, And Absurd..." And I Love It.

Rating: 10/10 (24 August 2019)

Annie Hall is a film that surprised me quite immediately by how eclectic it was. It was eclectic in its cinematography, its humour, its editing, its elaborate breaking of the fourth wall...and it went by so quickly that I felt like re-watching it immediately after the first viewing. Will I? I very well could. And not many films I've watched have ever instilled me with that feeling.
Maybe it inevitably comes down to the fact that many of the more intertextual jokes in Annie Hall are ones I don't completely understand. Possibly it's the jokes and little details that pass you by before you even get the chance to fully take it all in, like the photos Annie (Diane Keaton) took of Alvy (Woody Allen) with the lobster in a later scene or the pedestrian crossing lights changing to 'Walk' as Alvy leaves the frame after saying goodbye to Annie, literally and metaphorically indicating their relationship is over...maybe I'm reading into that too deeply.
But perhaps its 'rewatchability' results from the chemistry in its cast. The story of two neurotic but very different people who fall in and out of love is strange, compelling and oddly sweet, and the "fidgeting" and insistence of the narrative to go all over the place is as if Alvy is trying to piece together what went wrong in his and Annie's relationship - but the audience has vague ideas of why just by being outside observers. So the portrait the film paints of its characters could be why I like it so much. I can't honestly say, I would need to stew on it for a lot longer to come to a more definitive conclusion.
But what I do know is that, somehow, I love this film. Like it's final line, my interest in Annie Hall seems "totally irrational, and crazy, and absurd...", but something tells me I will keep revisiting this film for a while yet.
Overall: 10/10 - as with all my ratings, it's just an arbitrary number and may fluctuate.