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Such a frustrating disappointment

Sorry, this movie sucks

Pretty Good

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

Into his eighties, Woody Allen is prolific as ever, his annual output has been tenaciously consistent, although these most recent ones seem to have lost his mojo after the unexpected resurgence of plaudits for MIDNIGHT IN Paris (2011) and a Cate Blanchett Oscar-bait showcase BLUE JASMINE (2013).So one might feel more inclined to visit Allen's time-honroured earlier works, LOVE AND DEATH, his sixth feature, a kooky war parody gets certain inspiration from classic Russian novel. During the Napoleonic Wars, Boris Grushenko (Allen), is the weakling of his Russian family, a bookish pacifist, the characteristic Allen-esque persona, pining for his twice-removed cousin Sonja (Keaton), but the latter doesn't reciprocate with the same feeling, apart from their unbidden philosophical babble. When Napoleon (Tolkan, impersonates the personage with po-faced drollness) invades Austria, Boris and his brothers are enlisted in the Russian Army and sent to the front. However incompetent Boris is as a front-line soldier, a ludicrous and scarcely credible plot-device makes him a war hero.Reunited with Sonja, who has just widowed after the departure of her herring merchant husband Voskovec (Frieder), Boris tactfully has his wicked way with a man-eater Countess Alexandrovna (Georges-Picot), and miraculously survives from a duel between him and the latter's enraged lover and marksman Anton (Gould), more significantly, he takes advantage of Sonja's sympathy (who can refuse a man's dying wish?) and they marry eventually although it is to Sonja's great chagrin, according to her ideal theory of love's three aspects: intellectual, spiritual and sensual, Boris has never even been on her to-do list.Time comes to the rescue, Sonja gradually softens her harsh view towards Boris, who instead, is plagued by the notion of suicide, since childhood, death has always fascinated and engrossed him, from his surreal dream of men coming out of coffins, to a chance meeting with the Grim Reaper himself as a child, until a tête-à-tête with a dead soldier in the battleground. Just when their relationship ameliorates and they decide to start a family, Napoleon invades the Russian Empire, Boris proposes to flee, but Sonja broaches a bold plan to assassinate Napoleon out of ire. Together, they impersonate as the visiting Spanish count and his sister, to meet Napoleon at his headquarter in Moscow, but the dispute between murder and moral conscience troubles Boris, when the crunch arrives, can he administer the coup de grâce? Or, is it a death knell for him to finally be take away by the Grim Reaper?Throwaway jest aplenty, gallows humour delights, even the smart-aleck himself candidly confesses "my disgustingness is my best feature", LOVE AND DEATH remarkably buries Allen's usual pedantic pretension one inch beneath the tongue-in-cheek farce, also a full-blown Diane Keaton begins to upstage Allen with her comedic bent and emotive voltage.Blatant homages to Ingmar Bergman's THE SEVENTH SEAL (1957) and PERSONA (1966) aside, the movie also pays tributes to various comedians with slapstick humour and self-conscious doublespeak, adopting a fine selection of passages from modern-classic Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev, LOVE AND DEATH wallows in Woody Allen's idealistic vim and vigour, not his best, but definitely belongs to the brighter side.

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.

Back when Woody Allen movies actually sought to entertain, this was one of the best. The familiar Woody nebbish is caught up in the sweep of historical events paralleling those in Tolstoy's War and Peace. Typically, Woody plays the reluctant hero and revolutionary. He would rather pursue the promiscuous Diane Keaton, than fight in the Napoleonic Wars, but he cannot avoid his comic destiny, as events cleverly conspire to drag him from fire to frying pan over and over.The spread of targets for parody in this romp is its greatest strength. Even a well-schooled cineaste will be hard-pressed to catch the many clever references to famous Russian films and novels, notably the 1968 Sergei Bonderchuk version of War and Peace and the silent 1925 classic Battleship Potemkin.

Love and Death marks a very distinct transitional phase for Woody Allen, being the very last of his oddball comedies and the most sophisticated of them. It combines, essentially for the last time for Allen, incredibly silly puns and one liners that would fit in a Mel Brooks movie ("I think we should divide his letters... do you want the vowels or the consonants?") with clever satire and parody on Bergman and Dostoevsky. It's probably my ignorance in Russian classic literature that prevented me from enjoying it more, but I loved the loving Bergman spoofs and young Woody's quirky, neurotic humor. I can't name it as one of my favorite Allen films but it certainly holds its own as a fresh, hilarious piece.