Cast

Woody Allen, Diane Keaton, Tony Roberts, Carol Kane, Paul Simon, Shelley Duvall

awards

Oscar 1978 – best film, best director, best screenplay, best actress, BAFTA Awards 1978 – best film, best director, best screenplay, best actress, best editing, Golden Globes 1978 – best comedy actress

Film description

Annie Hall holds a special place among Woody Allen’s films. It is the first time the director shunned the parody and grotesque that characterized his previous achievements in favor of a paradigm he would, to greater or lesser extent, repeat in his future films: a love story about two New York neurotics. While Annie Hall is a formula story, it may also be Alan’s best film. Although 30 years have passed since the film debuted, the jokes are no less clever (with famous lines that include: don’t knock masturbation. It’s sex with someone I love), its exquisite word and situational comedy that goes hand-in-hand with the psychological penetration and salacious view into the customs of American intellectual and show business elites. The seemingly disorderly narration (lack of chronology, characters speaking directly to the camera) reflects the characters’ spiritual condition: their internal tremors, emotional blocks and frequently imagined issues.

Annie Hall combines humor with melancholy, reflection triumphs over absurdity, while relating the uniqueness of human relationships. Allen cast himself as the main male lead, the endlessly neurotic, frustrated and death-obsessed intellectual misanthrope (the film was initially titled Anhedonia – which means the inability to experience pleasure). Allen cast his wife at the time, Diane Keaton, as Annie Hall, whose distracted and glowing character is absolutely one of the most interesting portraits of women in the history of cinema.

Bartosz Żurawiecki