Sai and Shujath talk Cinema

If someone showed me Annie Hall and asked me to guess when it was made I wouldn’t have replied anything prior to 2000. That is exactly the first thing which struck me about this flick. For something loosely classified as a romantic comedy it was just too ahead of its times…both technically and contentwise.

There is nothing much of a story here - in fact the same old stuff you would come across in any modern day rom com - but this was the one which started it. The dialogue is just too witty and when it is from Woody Allen it is even more so …there were lot of occasions where I could not control my laughter. Haven’t laughed so much for any movie lately. The sequence I recall the most and laugh is when Diane Keaton calls Woody Allen over to her place at three in the morning to kill a spider. The only drawback with such an intelligently written script is that there is some one liner in almost every word spoken that a few of them lose their intended impact.

Another striking thing you’ll notice is the narrative technique. This is why I said earlier that I’d make a wrong guess about when this was filmed. Split screens, people walking from one scene into an another (quite like what was seen in the recent Jaan-e-Mann), actors directly speaking to the camera addressing the audience are all styles which originated through this film.

Woody Allen is a true one man show. Whatever he did for this movie (acting, writing and directing) is marvellous. Diane Keaton isn’t behind either. The chemistry between the two is great - well…they were actually a couple before this movie and as a result it is rumoured to be based on the real life of the lead pair. Annie Hall can easily qualify to be a masterpiece and it definitely one of the smartest written movies of all time. Whether you like or hate the genre you’ll definitely enjoy watching this. It really is that infectious.