It’s an odd thing to experience art fresh and then re-experience it with greater knowledge about it and its sources. As example, as a Woody Allen fan I’d watched his terrific 1975 satire Love And Death, filmed in Hungary and France, probably ten or twelve times, fully getting all the references to Fyodor Dostoevsky’s and Leo Tolstoy’s works, but I had never been in the position of viewing the film having knowledge of all the sly European cinema references; especially those which poke fun at Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman’s canon.
Love And Death was the last ‘purely comedic’ Woody Allen film before he entered his great Golden Age, starting with 1977’s Annie Hall and ending with 1992’s Husbands And Wives. It was a romp, or as one of the aliens in 1980’s Stardust Memories said, "We enjoy your films. Particularly the early, funny ones." It was also a great showcase of his comedic talents in synch with those of Diane Keaton. No other foil, male or female, has ever come close to the chemistry that duo exhibited. Of course, like almost all his films, Allen wrote as well as directed this film, and it represented a step up from his earlier works, like Bananas, Take The Money And Run, or Sleeper.
In this film, however, narrative is not at issue, for the film is really a series of blackout sketches that satirize its two titular subjects. Woody plays Boris Dimitrovich Grushenko, a cowardly Russian peasant, who narrates the opening of the film while awaiting his execution, and Diane Keaton plays his cousin, and later-to-be wife, Sonja. After a series of misadventures, which see Boris drafted for the war against Napoleon, he becomes an accidental hero, and takes a gorgeous lover, Ludmilla, the Countess Alexandrovna (Olga Georges-Picot), after Sonja has married an old herring merchant. The countess declares to Boris, "You are a great lover!" Boris says, "Thanks, I practice a lot when I’m alone." Boris survives a pistol duel with his lover’s spurned lover, Anton (Harold Gould), and then weds Sonja, who only agrees to marry him because she thinks that he won’t survive the duel. Of course, this is classic Woody Allen, which at his best, is classic comedy, even as he borrows some of that theme from Ingmar Bergman’s Smiles Of A Summer Night.
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