Sonja: “To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love. But then one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer; not to love is to suffer; to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy, then, is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be unhappy, one must love or love to suffer or suffer from too much happiness.”

Love and Death is Woody Allen’s funniest movie. There are very few movies, comedies, that I’ve ever seen that are more stuffed with so many brilliant and funny verbal and visual gags. Love and Death is relentless and it is the summation of Woody Allen’s pre-Annie Hall career. His early films such as Sleeper and Bananas were really over-the-top slapstick films with tons of gags, all very funny, very good films. After Annie Hall he seemed to calm down a bit and, although most of his films are still comedies, they relied less on gags and more on character. I couldn’t choose one Woody Allen period over another as I feel that one’s as good as the other. The one constant in his films is the Woody Allen persona, who is as reliably funny as Chaplin’s little tramp. In Love and Death that persona is dropped into 19th century Russia, the time of Napoleon’s invasion. Love and Death is a satire on many things, certainly War and Peace, but where much of the humor for me comes from the heady, pretentious, hilarious philosophical debates that the characters have. Almost every conversation in the film evolves into one of these debates. The dialogue is so complex and so clever (such as the above example that comes at the end of the film as Diane Keaton tries to explain to her cousin what love is). It reminds me of the great technical jargon from the movie Ghostbuster. Remember “Free-floating, full-torso, vaporous apparition?” Much of it gets even crazier than that and it’s amazing to me not only that the actors could make it work but that someone actually had the brain to write it down.

Russian gentleman: So who is to say what is moral?
Sonja: Morality is subjective.
Russian gentleman: Subjectivity is objective.
Sonja: Moral notions imply attributes to substances which exist only in relational duality.
Russian gentleman: Not as an essential extension of ontological existence.
Sonja: Can we not talk about sex so much?

I still think that Hannah and Her Sisters is Woody Allen’s best film but if someone said you can have one Woody Allen movie to watch for the rest of your life I would choose Love and Death. It’s hard to stress just how relentlessly funny this movie is. Watch it!

Boris: Sonja, are you scared of dying?
Sonja: Scared is the wrong word. I’m frightened of it.
Boris: That’s an interesting distinction.