Film Night in the Park: Annie Hall August 4, 2007

Presented by The San Francisco Neighborhood Theater Foundation

1977

Seminal, hilarious look at contemporary relationships, with Woody Allen playing Alvy Singer, a neurotic, insecure comedy writer (Allen began his own career as a gag writer for the "Tonight Show") who falls madly in love with Annie Hall (Diane Keaton), an aspiring singer. They fumble about in the early stages of their relationship like two teenagers groping toward sex and self-identity, mouthing cliches twisted in the Allen style to the wry, the incisive, and the sublimely ridiculous. They move in together, but he soon becomes so insecure about their affair that he pounces on her every move, interpreting these acts as rejection and disaffection. Eventually their own mutual uncertainty splits them apart and they are left to their careers and to trying again with other partners.

The simplicity of the seemingly impromptu story, set largely in Allen's beloved New York City, is part of ANNIE HALL's undeniable charm, along with Allen's flashbacks to childhood (with side-splitting Jonathan Munk as a young Woody) and constant asides to the camera, a device that sometimes has to carry the laughs. Allen moves freely through the flashbacks as a grown man, commenting on various scenes in a technique borrowed from Bergman's WILD STRAWBERRIES. The quip quotient is high (observing that Keaton habitually smokes a joint before they make love, Allen cracks, "Why don't you take sodium pentothal? Then you could sleep through the whole thing!") and Roberts is highly effective as the crass, materialistic sidekick.

Official Website: http://www.filmnight.org/annie_hall.htm