Following a young aspiring and well-known TV writer and a comedian, who falls deeply in love with the young aspiring and beautiful singer at a nightclub Annie Hall, but they suffer from misunderstanding between each other.
Allen tosses out the usual romantic comedy conventions for his own brand of humor, but under the gags and self-effacing jokes is the portrait of two people who fall in love and then... fall out of love.
Woody Allen fans will buy it 100%. Never before has the diminutive comedian been so urbane, so open - so funny. And with lovely Diane Keaton as consort, it becomes well-nigh irresistible (especially if you find Keaton as well-nigh irresistible as I do).
Although Woody Allen had still to acquire great technical strength as a film-maker, this was the movie where he found his own singular voice, a voice that echoes across events with a mixture of exuberance and introspection.
Allen joins the Catskills tummler's anything-for-a-laugh antics with a Eurocentric art-house self-awareness and a psychoanalytic obsession in baring his sexual desires and frustrations, romantic disasters, and neurotic inhibitions.
Allen (as a result of his exposure to Bergman, perhaps) has greatly matured as a filmmaking talent. Annie Hall is, by far, his most sophisticated, most emotionally complex film.
While its consonance comes largely from Gordon Willis's photography and Allen's spacious sense of New York, pathos comes at best from Keaton's evaporative performance and a slightly sentimental conception.
