FREE ON DAILYMOTION Woody Allen - Love And Death

"All men live under a sentence of death. They all go sooner or later. But I'm different. I have to go at 6 a.m. tomorrow morning. It would have been 5, but I had a good lawyer..." (Boris Gruschenko). This is how Woody Allen thinks and this is how Love And Death's strategy works: serious things are hidden behind cheerful slapstick. An ominous situation is simply attacked by the punch line and Allen often finds the right images to bring his philosophy to the point. Love And Death is certainly Allen's first serious film experiment! Of course, he is first and foremost a comedian of polished dialogue. The philosophical and moral decisions that follow his characters every step of the way also serve to let go of a whole chain of jokes. Yet Love And Death seems much more mature than any of Woody Allen's early films before. Allen's premise; imagine his basic character: Shy, incompetent, secretly romantic, fascinated by women and scared to death. Then you put him in a time loop and let him appear in Russia at the time of Napoleon's campaigns. He meets his childhood and death (which of course looks like death in Bergman's Seventh-Seal) - Then the Allen character may ask death: "What's it like after you die? Are there any girls?" Afterwards he has to fight against the French as a pacifist =militant coward and may marry a beautiful girl (she feels sorry for him and hopes that he will be shot in a duel). Basically, he turns Tolstoy's war and peace on its head and tries to hide in a cannon on the battlefield. He returns as a hero and loves Countess Alexandrovna, who admires him as a great lover: "Thanks"; he replies; "I practice a lot when I'm alone". Not an easy encounter, because his love forces him into his greatest moral crisis. A crisis that paralyzes him... Unlike the serial comedians of the 70s (that's what I call those who stick together like Allen Pointen), Allen doesn't try to make us all laugh by any means. He chooses a quieter path and that's that we start to like his character. He is cute, wants to do the right thing and convinces us that simplicity can still dominate the world.