Annie Hall


Annie Hall is a 1977 American satirical romantic comedy-drama film directed by Woody Allen from a screenplay written by Allen and Marshall Brickman, and produced by Allen's manager, Charles H. Joffe. The film stars Allen as Alvy Singer, who tries to figure out the reasons for the failure of his relationship with the eponymous female lead, played by Diane Keaton in a role written specifically for her.
Principal photography for the film began on May 19, 1976, on the South Fork of Long Island, and continued periodically for the next ten months. Allen has described the result, which marked his first collaboration with cinematographer Gordon Willis, as "a major turning point", in that, unlike the farces and comedies that were his work to that point, it introduced a new level of seriousness. Academics have noted the contrast in the settings of New York City and Los Angeles, the stereotype of gender differences in sexuality, the presentation of Jewish identity, and the elements of psychoanalysis and modernism.
Annie Hall was screened at the Los Angeles Film Festival on March 27, 1977, before its official release in the United States on April 20, 1977. The film received widespread critical acclaim, and was nominated for the Big Five Academy Awards, winning four: the Academy Award for Best Picture, two for Allen, and Best Actress for Keaton. The film additionally won four BAFTA Awards, including Best Film, Best Direction, Best Screenplay and Best Actress in a Leading Role, in addition to the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Comedy or Musical. The film's box office receipts in the United States and Canada of $38,251,425 are fourth-best of Allen's works when not adjusted for inflation.
Regarded among the greatest films ever made, it ranks 31st on AFI's list of the 100 greatest films in American cinema, 4th on their list of the greatest comedy films and 28th on Bravo's "100 Funniest Movies". Film critic Roger Ebert called it "just about everyone's favorite Woody Allen movie". The film's screenplay was also named the funniest ever written by the Writers Guild of America in its list of the "101 Funniest Screenplays". In 1992, the Library of Congress selected the film for preservation in the United States National Film Registry as being "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant". It is also regarded by critics as a landmark "transitional" film in Allen's career, moving his work from more "accessible" and surreal parody towards more "naturalistic" comic filmmaking.

Plot

Comedian Alvy Singer is trying to understand why his relationship with Annie Hall ended a year earlier. Growing up in Brooklyn, he vexed his mother with impossible questions about the emptiness of existence, and was precocious about his innocent sexual curiosity, suddenly kissing a classmate at six years old and not understanding why she was not keen to reciprocate.
Annie and Alvy, waiting in a movie theater line to see The Sorrow and the Pity, overhear another man deriding the work of Federico Fellini and referencing Marshall McLuhan. Alvy imagines McLuhan himself stepping in at his invitation to criticize the man's comprehension of his work. That night, Annie shows no interest in sex with Alvy. Instead, they discuss his first wife, whom he devalued because of her interest in him. His second marriage was to a New York writer who did not share his enthusiasm for sports and was unable to reach orgasm.
With Annie, it is different. The two of them have fun cooking a meal of boiled lobster together. He teases her about the unusual men in her past. They had met playing tennis doubles with friends. Following the game, awkward small talk leads her to offer him a ride uptown, and then a glass of wine on her balcony. There, what seemed a mild exchange of trivial personal data is revealed in "mental subtitles" as an escalating flirtation. Their first date follows Annie's singing audition for a nightclub. After having sex that night, Alvy is "a wreck", while Annie relaxes with a joint.
Soon, Annie admits she loves Alvy, while he buys her books on death and says that his feelings for her are more than just love. When Annie moves in with him, things become very tense. Eventually, Alvy finds her arm-in-arm with one of her adult-education professors, and the two begin to argue about whether this is the "flexibility" they had discussed. They eventually break up, and he searches for the truth of relationships, asking strangers on the street about the nature of love, questioning his formative years, and imagining a cartoon version of himself arguing with a cartoon Annie portrayed as the Evil Queen in Snow White.
Alvy attempts a return to dating, but the effort is marred by neurosis and an underwhelming sexual encounter that is interrupted when Annie calls in the middle of the night, urging him to come over immediately to kill a spider in her bathroom. A reconciliation follows, coupled with a vow to stay together, come what may. However, their separate discussions with their therapists make it evident there is an unspoken and unbridgeable divide. When Alvy accepts an offer to present an award on television, they travel to Los Angeles with Alvy's friend Rob. However, on the return trip, they agree that their relationship is not working. After losing Annie to her record producer Tony Lacey, Alvy unsuccessfully tries to rekindle the flame with a marriage proposal. Back in New York, he stages a play of their relationship, but he changes the ending: now she accepts.
The last meeting between Annie and Alvy takes place on Manhattan's Upper West Side after they have both moved on to someone new. Alvy's voice returns with the summation that though relationships are irrational, crazy, and absurd, we just need to have them. Annie sings "Seems Like Old Times".

Cast

Author Truman Capote has a cameo in the film. Alvy is making quips about people walking by. He says, "There's the winner of the Truman Capote look-alike contest" as Capote walks through the frame. Several actors who later gained a higher profile had small parts in the film: John Glover as Annie's actor boyfriend, Jerry; Jeff Goldblum as a man who "forgot mantra" at Tony Lacey's Christmas party; Beverly D'Angelo as an actress in Rob's TV show; and Sigourney Weaver, in her film debut, in the closing sequence as Alvy's date at the movie theater. Shelley Hack has a brief role, and Laurie Bird also appears, two years before her suicide.

Style and technique

Technically, the film marked an advance for the director. He selected Gordon Willis as his cinematographer—for Allen "a very important teacher" and a "technical wizard", saying, "I really count Annie Hall as the first step toward maturity in some way in making films". At the time, it was considered an "odd pairing" by many, Keaton among them. The director was known for his comedies and farces, while Willis was known as "the prince of darkness" for work on dramatic films like The Godfather. Despite this, the two became friends during filming and continued the collaboration on several later films, including Zelig, which earned Willis his first Academy Award nomination for Best Cinematography.
Willis described the production for the film as "relatively easy". He shot in varying styles; "hot golden light for California, grey overcast for Manhattan and a forties Hollywood glossy for ... dream sequences," most of which were cut. It was his suggestion which led Allen to film the dual therapy scenes in one set divided by a wall instead of the usual split screen method. He tried long takes, with some shots, unabridged, lasting an entire scene, which, for Roger Ebert, add to the dramatic power of the film: "Few viewers probably notice how much of Annie Hall consists of people talking, simply talking. They walk and talk, sit and talk, go to shrinks, go to lunch, make love and talk, talk to the camera, or launch into inspired monologues like Annie's free-association as she describes her family to Alvy. This speech by Diane Keaton is as close to perfect as such a speech can likely be ... all done in one take of brilliant brinksmanship." He cites a study that calculated the average shot length of Annie Hall to be 14.5 seconds, while other films made in 1977 had an average shot length of 4–7 seconds. Peter Cowie suggests that "Allen breaks up his extended shots with more orthodox cutting back and forth in conversation pieces so that the forward momentum of the film is sustained." Bernd Herzogenrath notes the innovation in the use of the split-screen during the dinner scene to powerfully exaggerate the contrast between the Jewish and the gentile family.
Although the film is not essentially experimental, at several points it undermines the narrative reality. James Bernardoni notes Allen's way of opening the film by facing the camera, which immediately intrudes upon audience involvement in the film. In one scene, Allen's character, in line to see a movie with Annie, listens to a man behind him deliver misinformed pontifications on the significance of Fellini's and Marshall McLuhan's work. Allen pulls McLuhan himself from just off-camera to correct the man's errors personally. Later in the film, when we see Annie and Alvy in their first extended talk, "mental subtitles" convey to the audience the characters' nervous inner doubts. An animated scene—with artwork based on the comic strip Inside Woody Allen—depicts Alvy and Annie in the guise of the Wicked Queen from Snow White. Although Allen uses each of these techniques only once, the "fourth wall" is broken several other times when characters address the camera directly. In one, Alvy stops several passers-by to ask questions about love, and in another, he shrugs off writing a happy ending to his relationship with Annie in his autobiographical first play as forgivable "wish-fulfillment". Allen chose to have Alvy break the fourth wall, he explained, "because I felt many of the people in the audience had the same feelings and the same problems. I wanted to talk to them directly and confront them."