Annie Hall: Balm for Neurotics

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These films are punishing, they make the audience pay for the jokes with a high degree of embarrassment; in them Allen plays a more-or-less consistent character, a libidinous but unsuccessful little cringer, wry, funny and touching but at the same time a little contemptible.

"Real life"

But in "real life", as Allen points out in his interviews, he is none of these things-and Annie Hall, as the publicity for the film has taken pains to establish, is autobiographical; unhesitatingly, flagrantly so, the story of the failure of Allen and Keaton's real relationship.

It is perhaps this function of the film that has determined the shift from the roughness and difficulty of the earlier films to the lyrical surface and the romanticism of Annie Hall, in which would-be singer Annie meets successful comedian Alvie, lives with him for awhile in New York, then leaves him to live in California with another man.

"Alvie" assured and successful, though not without serious preoccupations, is much closer to the real-life Allen than were the creeping schlemiels of Play It Again, Sam, Steeper and i Everything Always Wanted to Know.

And Annie "is" Diane Keaton-Hall is Keaton's real second name; and much has been made in the film's publicity of the fact that Keaton as Annie wears her own clothes throughout the film.

Style Of course, the clothes are important-a kind of signal. For while the film ostentatiously displays a set of trendy anxieties-in particular anxieties about death, about cultural and political identity, about sexual confusion and the limits of monogamy what it is really about is style.

It is a glamorous tilm, a glamorous love story, of a peculiarly American type.

For while on one level it is dealing with the way in which its characters seek to insulate themselves from their own very ordinary pasts and personalities by a kind of protective coloration of glamour, on another level the film itself is precisely doing that-it is all style, a film about a certain manner of being young-and-in-love-inNew-York.

It has less resemblance to other Allen films than to the innumerable Hollywood movies that centred on the adventures of witty, beautiful well-dressed couples: the sort of movie which in the '30s starred Clark Gable and Carole Lombard, or Carry Grant and Irene Dunne.

Cynicism

This film genre died away in the squeals of Doris Day as she made love to Rock Hudson while firmly clutching her pastel suit and matching fox-fur hat.

Those movies too had a kind of aggressive style, that is, they were as much about clothes and furniture as about people; but the incomparable cynicism which they manifested toward sexual relationships, made it impossible any longer for Hollywood to milk the set of illusions on which those movies depended.

At some point these glamorous young couples had to stop making wisecracks and it happened in Pillow Talk, in fact, in 1962-the double bed which is all the time lurking in a shut cupboard, started to roll out as if of its own will.

Sex Sex reared its ugly case of Rock and Doris. particularly ugly) head.

But in the "70s movie, sex does not have to be wheeled off and on-it can stick around, quietly, even if not altogether comfortably, for the duration of an entire film, without bruising the glamour.

But the (honest) Annie Hall relies for some of its effect on what is fast becoming a stock image-the girl-standing-in-the-rain-wearing-jumble-clothing.

It is an image which insists on itself, and relies on associations drawn from advertising and glossy magazines, no less than did the pink suits and padded bras of Doris Day. It is a movie in the style of a certain period.

This is not to argue altogether that there is nothing singular or important about Annie Hall; it is for one thing persistently and even weirdly loyal to the romanticism it adopts.

In what is something of a feat, it manages to romanticise such aspects of Annie as her hysteria, and her fear and dislike of sex.

Self-absorption

As preoccupied by the neurotic self-absorption of its lovers as was Play It Again, Sam, it is nevertheless more able than the earlier film to offer an account of the process by which such selfabsorption develops.

Again, as in Sam, the lovers' conversation is peppered with the language of psychoanalysis, but here less jokily, so that the film is able to cast an occasional sharply penetrating glance at the reflexes; particularly at the families in which they are fostered and developed.

The split-screen on which Annie's family chats to Alvie's sets up far more than the simply ludicrous contrast between the two families: it provides a kind of shockexplanation both Annie of and Alvie's love. of its and failure.

The film also plays a very interesting trick: it seems to be about Alvie, seems patently to be pulling the audience into his view of things, his corner.

Annie

But really its whole attention is given to Annie, to her story, her development, the changes in her life; and the dominance of Allen's voice in the script is really only an open confession of the film's male point-of-view, its projection of a picture of a woman, as she is seen by, explained by, a man.

The film's very sharp sense of this limitation connects it to recent films by other American directors, in particular Martin Scorsese and Robert Altman, who are similarly diffident about women, but absorbed by them; with Allen, they are the only mainstream directors who seem capable of a more than fleeting interest in the women whose faces their cameras flash past.

Harrowing

This attentiveness to Annie, in Annie Hall, produces an odd disjunction between the film's two effects-it is at once slick, and haunting, at once the film of the moment, and a film which unwraps at moments a quite harrowing ability to tell the exact pulses of a relationship By ELIZABETH THOMPSON

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the section dealing with the coalition government contained in the British Perspectives recently adopted by the 2nd Annual Conference of the Workers Socialist League. We are publishing the first part of LUgEY