Perhaps my favourite Woody Allen film (though there are numerous others to rival it), Love and Death is a delightfully funny and greatly intelligent little comedy that finds Allen creating one of his most lovable characters, the lovelorn coward Boris Grushenko, who really wants to spend the rest of his life with childhood sweetheart Sonja, but finds that the intentions of a certain Napoleon Bonaparte keep getting in the way.
The film is beautifully shot on location in France and Hungary, with Allen and his director of photography Ghislain Cloquet making the most of the vast snowy landscapes or cavernous woodlands, whilst the interiors employ a great deal of candle-light and natural lighting, which brings to mind Kubrick's Barry Lyndon. In fact, Love and Death could be seen as something of a comedic take on certain themes prevalent in Kubrick's aforementioned masterpiece, with both films employing notions of loyalty, war, love, death, games and deception. True, Stanley would never have had his main protagonist shot out of a cannon into the exploding tent of the enemy, or, offered us a supporting character who spends more time worrying about fish than tending to the needs of his young wife... but still, the intention is there.
Because of this, the film works on a number of levels... firstly, as a comedy, or more importantly, as a spoof of historical epics, whilst the constant allusions to Russian literature and Russian cinema throughout (check the cross-cutting of the lions during Boris and Sonja's sex-scene, or the soldier shot through the eye in battle as a references to Battleship Potemkin) offer another layer of entertainment. It also offers some rather deep moments and ruminations on the nature of war and humanity and, of course, love and death itself... though these are sugarcoated beneath references to the likes of Socrates, Chaplin, Thomas Aquinas and, most obviously, Bergman.
Woody is at his best as the wise-cracking Grushenko, stumbling through battles, banquets and an assassination plot, whilst simultaneously offering more comic one-liners than an open mic night. This, along with Sleeper, is probably Woody's best film in terms of non-stop verbal comedy, with the back and forth sparring between Allen and his muse of this era, Diane Keaton (who is on great comic form as the loveless Sonja) is more obvious than it would be in later (more mature) projects like Annie Hall and Manhattan, with the pair managing to make jokes about everything, from war, to relationships and the metaphysical. Obviously I can't list every single classic line or sight gag, since there are far too many; though it must be said that the character of the father (a land-owner who literally carries his miniscule plot around in his pocket; "one day I hope to build on it" he says... and he does!!) is comedy genius, whilst the back and forth dialog between Boris and the Countess Alexandra is Allen at his wittiest ("you're the greatest lover I've ever had" she breathes, before Allen replies "well, I practice a lot when I'm alone").
The film is packed full of great moments, beautiful photography and production design and some perfectly judged comedic performances (further proof that Allen is one of the best and most underrated filmmakers in America), from Allen's bumbling, bespectacled assassin, to the dry and neurotic creation of Keaton ("I'm having trouble adjusting my belt... do you think you could come over here and hold my bosom for a while?"), whilst there's strong support from Olga Georges-Picot, Harold Gould, James Tolkan and Jessica Harper.
The ending is perfectly pitched, finding the right balance between the farce and the comic pathos, with Woody indulging his influences once again, with that great Tarkovsky-like rumination on wheat (with Allen framing Keaton and Harper in a manner that brings to mind the framing of Liv Ullman and Bibi Anderson in Bergman's Persona) and that final shot that has Woody dancing through the trees with Death... a delightful homage to Bergman's The Seventh Seal. Love and Death is brilliant stuff from beginning to end, filled with great moments of wit (and sight-gags that predate the giddy likes of Airplane and Police Squad), and, is a film that could, quite easily, be considered as Allen's first masterpiece... comedic or otherwise.
