14 Love Stories: ANNIE HALL

Happy February!  We're halfway through the late winter doldrums, and that means its time for candy hearts and movies about young beautiful people trying to score.  Don't give me any of that anti-Valentine's Day crap.  I'm single and even a bit cynical, but I think that just makes it better.  The nice thing about Valentine's is that, being about romantic love, there's a whole genre of films appropriate for holiday viewing; the trick is finding the good ones!  I'll give you a few of my recommendations, 14 to be exact.  I don't know if these are really the "best" romance movies ever, and I few of them I'm sure are not, but I personally love each one.

Not all love is happy, and when someone pretends like it is, we become inclined to hate their guts. It's an element of life so compelling and so perplexing, and it's hard to keep its longings down for long.  Some filmmakers have devoted practically their entire careers to musing on its emotional and psychological depths and paradoxical nature; one such filmmaker is Woody Allen.  The definitive neurotic who encouraged a nation to embrace psychotherapy and obsesses over topics of sexuality and mortality from a wry comic perspective had made a couple of quirky comedies in the early 1970s, but even as STAR WARS overwhelmed every corner of the entertainment industry in 1977, there was a more intellectually ambitious little film that turned the heads of critics and scholars.  Today, it remains one of, if not the, definitive movies about dating and sexual relationships.

ANNIE HALL  (1977)
Directed by Woody Allen
Starring: Woody Allen, Diane Keaton, Tony Roberts, Carol Kane, Paul Simon, Janet Margolin, Shelley Duvall, Christopher Walken
Rated PG for unspecified reasons  (contains strong PG-13-level mature thematic material involving sexual content and references, and for drug use).
Availability: Rental on some streaming services, some retailers

"Well, I guess that's pretty much now how I feel about relationships; y'know, they're totally irrational, and crazy, and absurd, and... but, uh, I guess we keep goin' through it because, uh, most of us... need the eggs."  -ANNIE HALL

Woody Allen is one of the most distinctive personalities in the history of cinema, both behind and in front of the camera.  He consistently makes me think of soft jazz, maybe because that's an element in many of his movies that I've associated strongly with those films, or maybe because that's how I interpret his style.  I don't know.  His distinct personality can be as much a hindrance as a value for his films though, because it results in a lack of versatility.  Allen does not work beyond his established area, and so as he churns out an average of one film per year nowadays, only about one every few years at most is worth the while.  When it comes to Woody Allen, he's always looking for the elusive sweet spot of his experience, and that's where his finest films come from.  The film where he's hit the hardest and in exactly the right spot more than any other is ANNIE HALL.  It's the most Allen-esque of his films, composed of the typical themes of sexuality, neurosis, psychology, satire and fantasy, all wrapped up neatly in a romantic comedy.
One of those popular bits of movie trivia, the sort that every up-and-coming movie buff admires themselves for knowing, is that ANNIE HALL was originally produced under the title "Anhedonia", which means "the inability to feel pleasure", which aptly describes the main character, Alvy Singer, played by Allen.  After a series of dismissed alternatives including "It Had to Be Jew" and "Me and My Goy", Allen finally settled on "Annie Hall", which proved the most successful in test screenings.
It's a story told non-linearly, but even compared to other non-linear films, it's thoroughly atypical.  The film is presented as a "cinematic essay" on the nature of romantic relationships, told through the eyes of Alvy Singer, who interacts directly with the camera, as if in conversation with himself, as he sorts out the memories of his relationship history.  In his account, he is not bound to the limits of logic and reality, in one scene going back and interviewing his grade school class about his premature libido and in another scene, introducing philosopher Marshall McLuhan from behind a decorative plant to deride a pretentious stranger's analysis of his works, a moment of pure wish-fulfillment.  Alvy looks back on his three major romantic relationships; his first wife, Carol (Carol Kane), who Alvy non-deliberately avoided sexual intimacy with by obsessing over the JFK assassination conspiracy ("Is it the old Groucho Marx joke that I'm - I just don't want to belong to any club that would have someone like me for a member?" he quips), his second wife, Robin (Janet Margolin) who was blamed her failures to reach orgasm on the New York City traffic.  His third major romantic relationship, and the one integral to the plot of the film, is with Annie Hall (Diane Keaton), a ditzy country gal from Wisconsin.  Alvy reminisces about his time with Annie, from their first introductions playing tennis doubles with friends, through the evolution of their relationship, moving in together, the deterioration of their relationship and their eventual split.
Inventive experimental moments provide comic insights to the nature of romantic interaction and perspectives, such as Annie's and Alvy's conversation on her balcony, during which the typical small talk is undercut by subtitles of what each is actually thinking onscreen, or a moment when Alvy, musing on his unpopular childhood sympathies toward Disney's SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS, imagines himself as a cartoon asking the unwelcoming Wicked Queen if she's on her period.
It's obviously not a typical, feel-good love story, but it's a reassuring and honest one, taking the good with the bad, all in a bizarre, neurotic variation on the fairy tale love story.