Good mourning, Mr. Allen ! ...

Rating: 10/10 (15 September 2011)

Only three things are infinite : the Universe, human stupidity and Woody Allen's comical genius ...
I love "Love and Death" to death because it's the quintessential example of the boundlessness of humor, a sort of irreverence that equals the genius of the other period comedy made the same year: "Monty Python and the Holy Grail". Yet, there's something more appealing in "Love and Death", a sort of endearing quality in the main character, Sergei Dimitriovitch, brilliantly portrayed by Woody Allen supported by a superb performance from Diane Keaton as the delicious, frivolous and voluptuous Sonja. I never thought Kay Adams could be so damn sex... I mean, funny.
Sure, Woody plays the usual neurotic and tormented character but combined with the period setting and the picaresque narrative, it immediately provides a hilarious twist. He's insecure, weak, short, ugly, in a way, he makes us feel superior or luckier, but as the movie progresses, and as we get deeper in his subconscious, we're contaminated by his endless questionings about the meaning of life. Woody Allen's "Love and Death" takes very seriously the humor it uses to make fun of seriousness, and the inner intelligence of the film relies on the level of absurdity it shamelessly reaches while tackling metaphysical subjects such as love, death, life, sex, and turning them into the most pleonastic derision. Ultimately, Woody Allen's epic period masterpiece resonates as the triumphant intellectual demonstration that life is damn too serious to be taken seriously, life is about living, enjoying, having fun, sex Disguised in cowardice and refusal to make war, Sergei's approach is in fact more hedonistic and inspirational in its intelligent demonstration that even for the average schmuck, the greatest things can work out of a misunderstanding!
But misunderstanding implies the use of intelligence, and if there's no better comedy than a comedy with a heart, there's no funnier comedy that one with intelligence. And the mightiest power of intelligence relies on its capacity to exceed its idiomatic limits and idiotic means to defy the great law that defines our existence: absurdity. "Love and Death" echoes the philosophical condition of our limited intelligence that can only bow to the all-powerfulness of God, and the infinity of the Universe and smell the stinking feet of our mortal condition. But instead of crying over that defining reality, Allen teaches us to laugh about it. Laugh is the mourning of truth's death. And no mourning could be more glorious than the joyful ballet between Woody Allen and the white-draped Death with the catchy music of Serge Prokofiev, highlighting with a prodigious harmony the cheerful nature of Death, as the ultimate way to get rid of all the torments inherent to life, now, cynicism has never been so deliriously funny! Woody indeed never rhymed so well with funny, at the pinnacle of his comedic period, after "Take the Money and Run" or "Bananas", before his films would rely essentially on homages, especially to Ingmar Bergman. Woody would never be funnier, which is not saying much because this is one of the funniest films ever.
Sergei is naturally comical as a living anachronism with his modern existentialist questions, one century and half before this thinking would be developed by Sartre and Camus, not to mention his trademark black horn-rimmed glassed. The whole film is a delightful experiment on the countless possibilities to make people laugh. Slapstick comedy à la Keaton and Chaplin, wisecracking jokes à la Groucho Marx, naughty and vulgar humor à la Mel Brooks, everything deliciously enrobed with a Comedia Dell' Arte grandeur and decadence. And still with this unique Allenian feel, as he successfully transcends his comical abilities and make you laugh from the most unlikely intelligent stuff, and somewhat, we get the intelligence of his script more efficiently through the medium of humor, the genius of "Love and Death" is that we may get more from Bergman through THIS film, than the movies it supposedly make laugh of.
Think about this : "To laugh is proper to man. To make someone laugh is to awake the most humanistic side of his nature. Intelligence is proper to man, too. To laugh is to be intelligent. But nonsense makes laugh, therefore, nonsense inspires intelligence. Nonsense is intelligence when it awakes the most humanistic side of his nature. But to makes laugh, nonsense requires intelligence, intelligence inspires nonsense. Yet intelligence condemns nonsense, and then nonsense condemns nonsense. Defining nonsense is depriving it from its essence, therefore its existence, and what exists through its non existence defies the notion of truth and reason. Nonsense is absurd. But what is absurd is funny. Absurd makes laugh. Absurd is proper to man. Nonsense is proper to man. Quod Erat Demonstrandum."
Of course, everything you read doesn't make sense, but it does obey to a certain logic that governs our intelligence, the quest for a meaning. All the purpose of humanity, of the philosophers who passed this world was to find a meaning, to end up with the same conclusion: that there's no proper conclusion, no possibility to reason with the human condition without getting confused or mixed up with so many frustrating concerns. If one must accept the existence of God, he should accept whatever God gives him, including the free will that allows him to doubt His existence: "Knowledge implies doubt, doubt inspires knowledge and vice versa, knowledge constructs intelligence, enough intelligence to get the absurdity of the world. To build knowledge to deconstruct the world. That's the essence of absurdity"
And Woody Allen raises above the absurdity of our world a masterpiece of pure hilarity, proving that if he's not the Eisenstein (God forbid his glasses were ever broken), he's surely the Einstein of film-making!