Make it quarter to twelve.

Rating: 9/10 (7 May 2016)

Tolstoy may have War and Peace, but it pales in comparison to the sweeping gravitas of Allen's Love and Death, which tackles two even more universal issues which plague us all. In this film, Allen shows his remarkable talent at engaging with grander, more immediate themes that his earlier comedies but still have that magic touch which turns any situation into hilarity. The plot is a parody of the dense, high- minded Russian epics, in particular those of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. Allen's neurotic, wimpy type is dropped right into the setting, Russia during the Napoleonic Wars, where all the young men are practically jumping out of their skin to serve their motherland, whilst Boris would rather sheepishly sneak away and work on his butterfly collection. Allen's physical comedy is on show here in brilliant form; most notably in a montage of all his army incompetencies and goofs, his schoolboy wooing tactics of a Countess, and perhaps the most delightful of them all, a muted, sped up slapstick sequence involving Allen, Keaton and a guard they are trying to knock out with an empty bottle, which recalls the silent film masters and their antics. He uses the frame (see the bickering and slap-fighting of Napoleon and his double) and the edit (six minutes later the Countess' room is strewn with overturned furniture like a thief had been through it) to great effect.
The film tackles all the dense philosophical ideas of the Russian literature it parodies with a bemused perspective. Boris sticks out like a sore thumb amongst the gruff and uncivil Russian environment and spouts streams of existential jargon that become so complex and redundant that they lose all meaning. He constantly spars verbally with her cousin Sonja, the Anna Karenina figure, who is also embroiled in a web of social anxieties and troubled relationships. Keaton has a remarkable knack for her deadpan delivery of the absurd, further pushing these situations into hilarity: "I'm twenty eight and he's eighty one." When that man drops dead suddenly in her moment of faux triumph, she quickly decides on another lover, and the film treats it as if they were destined for each other, despite his tendency to talk about the herring industry very seriously and her tendency to sleep around vicariously (the tender deathbed moment interrupted by exaggerated coughing and clearing of throats at the mention of her 'purity' is gold).
Watching this with the knowledge of the prevalence of the Allen-type about to boom next with Annie Hall and so on is extremely valuable. Here Allen has the self-awareness of the pitfalls of his intellectual character and has perfectly emphasised them in a context that asks for the opposite. He is not the heroic soldier but rather stumbles onto an opportunity which covers his chest with medals. His awkward aversion for violence is mistaken for the highest of nobilities (A similarly amusing pistol duel that year from Barry Lyndon also mocks the prissy, formal nature of these life-and-death shootouts). He is an intellectual like so many before and after him, and sensual, and as spiritual as he can be, but never really takes life seriously because there is an existential meaningless about it. Life's cruel twist is that he has this sort of spiritual awakening as he is jailed, a Dostoevskian epiphany, and as just as he decides to have found his meaning for living, God stands him up. And so he dances on along with Death. Very funny indeed, in a cruel and ironic way.