TSPDT placing: #877
Directed by: Woody Allen
Written by: Woody Allen, Mildred Cram (uncredited), Donald Ogden Stewart (uncredited)
Starring: Woody Allen, Diane Keaton, Jessica Harper, Olga Georges-Picot, James Tolkan
WARNING: Plot and/or ending details may follow!!!
It's always interesting to observe Woody Allen in his various "early, funny movies." In the period beginning with Take the Money and Run (1969) and ending with Annie Hall (1977) – a major turning point in both his film-making and how his talents were perceived by the public – we can see the director's work growing in maturity and intelligence. In Bananas (1971) just several years earlier, Allen had melded an assortment of random gags into something of a political satire; many of the jokes worked, some didn't, and the resultant film was a funny, if bewildering, anarchic comedy with a clumsy narrative structure. With Sleeper (1973), Allen looked towards the future, and his dystopic vision of a society gone haywire provided a comfortable combination of witty dialogue and nostalgic slapstick humour, even if some sequences retained touches of juvenility. Love and Death (1975) is the most profound of his "transition" comedies, and, in the classy setting of nineteenth century Russia, the comedian delivers his thoughts on life, death, God, war and sex – but mostly sex.
Love and Death (1975) was obviously produced shortly after an Ingmar Bergman marathon, and the film is both an affectionate homage and an enjoyable spoof of The Seventh Seal (1957), Bergman's memorable meditation on the nature of religion and death. The perfect bittersweet ending sees Death, cloaked in a white sheet, leading our hero in a Danse Macabre across the countryside. Also targeted by Allen's razor-sharp flair for parody are the epic Russian novels of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, such as "Crime and Punishment," "The Idiot" and "War and Peace." A singularly-absurd recreation of the Battle of Waterloo, which – among other anachronisms – is catered by a New York hot-dog vendor, is also an amusing send-up of Sergei Bondarchuk's impressive box-office disaster Waterloo (1970), and even Bonaparte himself makes a surprise appearance as both an assassination target, and to demand the completion of the pastry to be named in his honour {we call them vanilla slices down here in Australia}.
Woody Allen and Diane Keaton, in their third of many collaborations, work together perfectly as cousins (and later partners) who like to bicker endlessly about the meaning of life, their conversations descending swiftly into dubious pseudo-philosophical ramblings of which I was able to make neither head nor tail. With the exception of one bottle gag that wouldn't have been out of place in a Chaplin film, most of the humour is purely verbal, and Allen even experiments with breaking the fourth wall, a style of comedy that he would implement with astonishing success in Annie Hall. In terms of story, Love and Death, in spite of its episodic nature, comes together more completely than any of Allen's previous films, and the jokes are consistently funny enough to draw a laugh. Considerably funnier than that other famous historical comedy released in 1975 (if I may be so bold), this is one of Woody Allen's funniest movies, with more than enough intelligent humour to go around.
8/10
Currently my #4 film of 1975:
1) One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (Milos Forman)
2) Dersu Uzala (Akira Kurosawa)
3) Pasqualino Settebellezze {Seven Beauties} (Lina Wertmüller)
4) Love and Death (Woody Allen)
5) Jaws (Steven Spielberg)
If I ever had any doubts that Akira Kurosawa was my kind of film director, then I may now consider them groundless. After two solid but flawed efforts in Stray Dog (1949) and 
Akira Kurosawa, working with cinematographers Fyodor Dobronravov, Yuri Gantman and Asakazu Nakai, has committed to celluloid some of the most strikingly-gorgeous images since David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia (1962). The wilderness of Siberia is, at first glance, exceedingly mundane and unremarkable, but, out of the sheer isolation and purity of the landscape, Kurosawa uncovers a noble beauty about the trees, rocks, waters and, indeed, the people who survive there. The film's most breathtaking shot shows Arsenyev and Dersu perched before a pristine sunset, the pair perfectly-framed between the blazing red Sun and the ascending Moon. Out of a bitter windstorm on the frozen expanses of a lake, Kurosawa crafts an intense episode of nail-biting suspense, as the two frantically attempt to gather grass for the purposes of constructing a crude but vital sleeping shelter, their only opportunity to avoid freezing to death in the relentless cold of the Siberian night. Recognising the inherent beauty in the landscape he was photographing, Kurosawa often makes excellent use of long takes, allowing the viewer to simply sit back and absorb the majesty of the wilderness with which he has been surrounded.
Another important theme in Dersu Uzala is the cultural and environmental toll of progress. It was only during the early years of the 1900s that the Sikhote-Alin region of Siberia began to abandon its old-time traditions and lifestyles in order to catch up with the more advanced civilisations that surrounded it. Dersu, who has lived alone in the forest for much of his life, proves a final victim of society's progress, a tragic symbol of a culture that has been irretrievably lost in the past. With his dwindling eyesight, and an escalating superstitious paranoia of the forest caused by his senseless murder of a tiger, Dersu finds that he can no longer provide for himself, and so accompanies Arsenyev back to his home in the city. His spirit crushed and broken, Dersu spends his days staring soullessly into the burning fireplace, consumed by memories of his lifetime in the free and peaceful isolation of the forest. He eventually resolves to return to the wilderness, but is shortly murdered for his expensive rifle; the lone hunter has now been completely destroyed by the unstoppable march of progress, which brings along both its benefits and its unavoidable evils.
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