Recommendations of the Editorial team
After Woody Allen made perhaps his funniest film – a story about love, fear, death and identity in Russia during the Napoleonic Wars – his next film would deal with the seriousness of life: love, fear, death and identity in New York in the 1970s. It should be called “Anhedonia,” after a psychological term that describes the inability to feel joy and pleasure.
Allen was just as uninterested in a strict plot as he was in his early comedies, which were always collections of gags loosely attached to an outrageous plot – stand-up as a film. “Anhedonia” was intended to be an associative collage not unlike Fellini’s “8½”: comic autobiographical episodes, dream sequences, reflections, fantasies, love stories and fictional interviews, held together by its protagonist, the neurotic New York intellectual Alvy Singer.
In the elevator with Richard Nixon
Contrary to his habit of never filming more than necessary, Allen shot hour after hour with his ensemble and cameraman Gordon Willis, who was nicknamed “Prince of Darkness” since his work on the second part of Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Godfather,” and wrote the script he had written with Marshall Brickman while still on set.
He later filmed never-before-seen scenes in which little Alvy spoke to Sigmund Freud, philosophical discussions about Kant and Kierkegaard, a New York Knicks game in which Alvy dribbled alongside his idols, or a sequence inspired by Dante’s “Inferno” in which his protagonist, played by him, is led down to hell in an elevator by the devil and New sinners – from CIA agents to fast food servers – boarded on every floor. Almost at the bottom, Richard Nixon joined the diabolical traveling party, accompanied by blazing flames.
The first cut of the film was three hours long – and a big mess. However, editor Ralph Rosenblum recognized that the scenes between Alvy and his ex-girlfriend Annie Hall – played by Allen’s ex-girlfriend Diane Keaton, whose real name was Diane Hall – had a special magic.
Keaton’s style
This was hardly surprising, as the chemistry between Allen and Keaton had already carried “Sleeper” and “Love and Death”. Even after their private separation, they seemed to attract each other in their opposites: he, the son of second-generation Jewish immigrants, the son of a casual worker and schlemiel extraordinaire and an accountant who grew up in Midwood/Brooklyn; she, the daughter of a Californian real estate agent and a “Mrs. Los Angeles”, from a conservative milieu in which, according to Allen, you were considered a socialist if you helped a blind person cross the street.
Rosenblum and Allen then began to radically restructure the film. From the abstract study of existential fear, they extracted the love story between Alvy and Annie. A self-reflection became a portrait of a modern couple relationship. Keaton had created her character as a supporting character who shared a lot with her own personality: stubborn, intellectually quick-witted, imperfect, chaotic and funny. Her wardrobe also reflected this: wide tweed trousers, men’s vests, ties, shirts with rolled-up sleeves.
Through Diane’s eyes
Keaton wore androgynous clothing, like Patti Smith on the cover of her debut “Horses,” photographed by Robert Mapplethorpe, which was released a few weeks before “Annie Hall” began filming. The film was unconventional, perhaps even revolutionary, in its way of portraying femininity – not least because its leading actress was originally only supposed to play a supporting role.
“Her beauty is not conventional. And by conventional I mean what pleases the eye,” Allen quipped decades later when Keaton received the AFI Life Achievement Award. “She dresses in a way that hides her sexuality – and she’s done that very well over the years because it’s never come out.” He loves to tease her a little, Allen continued, but she is a big part of what he has accomplished in his life. “Through her, I saw life through her eyes.”
Keaton’s influence
It was also Keaton who stepped in during Allen’s darkest hour in the early 1990s. When he was accused by Mia Farrow of sexually abusing their daughter, she took over the female lead role in “Manhattan Murder Mystery” that was originally intended for Farrow. Allen then rewrote the script in order to be able to use the comic talent of his new leading actress and ultimately made one of his most beautiful and lightest films, which was also a declaration of love to Keaton. Also the way Emily Mortimer in Allen’s late triumph “Match Point” (2005) plays tennisseems one Homage to be Annie (and Diane) Hall.
But the influence of Keaton and her cinematic alter ego goes far beyond Allen’s work. Of course, you can recognize him in almost every romantic comedy in which the female lead is more than a passive muse and object of male desire. You can also see them in Ralph Lauren’s fashion, in Greta Gerwig’s films such as “Frances Ha” or in some of Billie Eilish’s outfits.
Nothing better than Diane Keaton could have happened to Woody Allen, to cinema, to fashion and to us.