Plot
About to be executed for a crime he never committed, Boris Grushenko recalls how he got into his present predicament. Initially scheduled to die at 5:00 am, Boris receives leniency—a delay in execution until 6:00 am.
Ivan, Mikhail, and Boris are three brothers grown to “full manhood,” with Ivan and Mikhail brawny and athletic, and Boris a scrawny 5'6". Since childhood, Boris has been in love with his cousin Sonja, with whom he has deep conversations. 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. I hope you're getting this down."
Sonja tells Boris that she yearns for a man who embodies her three essentials of love: intellectuality, spirituality, and sensuality. Thinking that she is confessing her love for him, Boris is devastated when Sonja says she has been in love with Ivan all her life. Boris: "Ivan can barely write his name in the ground with a stick."
When Ivan announces that he intends to marry Anna Ivanova, a desolate Sonja immediately announces that she will marry Sergei Minskov, 81. Excited, Minskov immediately dies from a heart attack. Sonja then marries Leonid Boskovic, the herring merchant, who amuses himself with herring while Sonya dallies with a musician.
When Napoleon invades Austria during the Napoleonic Wars, Boris, a coward and pacifist, is forced to enlist in the Russian army. Boris doesn’t believe in fighting for “Mother Russia.” Boris’s Mother: "I hope they put him in the front lines!"
Boris completes military training, including a “hygiene play” on condoms and venereal disease. On furlough, Boris flirts at the opera with the beautiful Countess Alexandrovna, whose current lover has killed several men in duels. Countess: "You’re the greatest lover I ever had." Boris: "I practice a lot when I’m alone."
Unhappy in her marriage, Sonja recounts a long list of lovers. Boris offers to take her away, but Sonja asks after Ivan. When Boris tells her he is going to the front the next day, Sonja bids Boris, “have a nice time!” Boris inadvertently becomes a war hero when he falls asleep inside a large cannon and is fired into the French command tent, killing the officers. The regiment that started with 1200 men in battle thins down to 14 survivors; a message from the Czar encourages, “keep up the good work.” Ivan, a battle fatality, is bayonetted to death by a "Polish conscientious objector."
A Turkish cavalry officer impugns Sonja’s chastity. Boskovic dies accidentally while cleaning his pistol in preparing for a duel to defend her honor. Sonja laments she wasn’t kinder to him—perhaps even having sex with him once.
The Countess’s lover, Anton Lebedokov, challenges Boris to a duel. Boris returns and proposes to the widowed Sonja, who promises to marry him, thinking he will be killed in the duel. To her surprise and dejection, Boris survives the duel. Their marriage is filled with philosophical debates. Sonja: "Sex without love is an empty experience." Boris: "Yes, but as empty experiences go, it’s tough to beat." As time passes, he wins Sonja’s heart.
Sonja conceives a plot to assassinate Napoleon at his headquarters in Moscow. They debate the matter with philosophical doublespeak, and Boris reluctantly agrees. At an inn enroute to Moscow they encounter Don Francisco and his sister, emissaries from Joseph Bonaparte to Napoleon. Boris and Sonya waylay the Spaniards, taking their place. Unknowingly, they meet with Napoleon’s double, who attempts to seduce Sonja but is knocked out by her after Boris fails various attempts. Over the unconscious body, Sonya and Boris debate the ethics of killing Napoleon. While Boris vacillates, another intended Napoleon assassin shoots the double.
Sonja escapes arrest, but Boris is captured. Despite being told by a vision that he will be pardoned, Boris is executed. Boris's ghost bids goodbye to Sonja and the audience before dancing away with Death.
Style
Coming between Allen's Sleeper (1973) and Annie Hall (1977), Love and Death is in many respects an artistic transition between the two. [3] Allen pays tribute to the humor of The Marx Brothers, Bob Hope and Charlie Chaplin throughout the film.
The dialogue and scenarios parody Russian novels, particularly those by Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, such as The Brothers Karamazov , Crime and Punishment , The Gambler , The Idiot and War and Peace . [3] This includes a dialogue between Boris and his father in which each line alludes to, or is composed entirely of, Dostoyevsky titles.
The use of Prokofiev on the soundtrack adds to the Russian flavor of the film. Prokofiev's "Troika" from the Lieutenant Kijé Suite is featured prominently, for the film's opening and closing credits and in selected scenes in the film when a "bouncy" theme is required. The battle scene is accompanied with music from Prokofiev's Alexander Nevsky cantata. Boris is marched to his execution to the "March" from Prokofiev's The Love for Three Oranges . [3]
Some of the humor is straightforward; other jokes rely on the viewer's awareness of classic literature or contemporary European cinema. For example, the final shot of Keaton is a reference to Ingmar Bergman's Persona . [3] The sequence with the stone lions is a parody of Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin , while the Russian battle against Napoleon's army heavily parodies the same film's "Odessa steps" sequence. [3] Bergman's The Seventh Seal is parodied several times, including during the climax. [3]
Reception
The film grossed $20.1 million in North America, [2] making it the 18th highest grossing picture of 1975 in North America (theatrical rentals were $5 million). [4]
On Rotten Tomatoes, 25 out of 25 critics gave the film a positive rating, with a 100% rating and a average rating of 9.4/10. The site's consensus reads: "Woody Allen plunks his neurotic persona into a Tolstoy pastiche and yields one of his funniest films, brimming with slapstick ingenuity and a literary inquiry into subjects as momentous as Love and Death". [5] Metacritic , which uses a weighted average , assigned the film a score of 89 out of 100, based on 6 critics, indicating "universal acclaim". [6]
Roger Ebert gave it three and a half stars and wrote: "Miss Keaton is very good in Love and Death, perhaps because here she gets to establish and develop a character, instead of just providing a foil, as she's often done in other Allen films ... There are dozens of little moments when their looks have to be exactly right, and they almost always are. There are shadings of comic meaning that could have gotten lost if all we had were the words, and there are whole scenes that play off facial expressions. It's a good movie to watch just for that reason, because it's been done with such care, love and lunacy." [7]
Gene Siskel awarded a full four stars and wrote: "Woody Allen is simply terrific in Love and Death. To my mind, it's his funniest film. He plays to his greatest strength (gag line dialog) and stays away from what has limited his other movies (an attempt to develop a story)." [8] Vincent Canby of The New York Times called the film "Woody Allen's grandest work" and "side-splitting." [9] Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times declared: "Thin but likable just about sums it up." [10] Gary Arnold of The Washington Post found the film "funny with remarkable and delightful consistency." [11] Penelope Gilliatt of The New Yorker thought that Woody Allen and Diane Keaton "have become an unbeatable new team at pacing haywire intellectual backchat. Their style works as if each of them were a less mock-assertive Groucho Marx with a duplicate of him to play against. For such a recklessly funny film, the impression is weirdly serene." [12] Geoff Brown of The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote that "the occasional longueurs and dud jokes never prove fatal to the movie's overall success; to use the description Boris applies to his father, Woody Allen is a 'major loon' and Love and Death provides a fine showcase for his talent." [13]
Comedian and filmmaker Bill Hader talked about his appreciation of the film, having listed it as one of his favorite films saying: "I love Diane Keaton in this movie so much. My first real movie crush. It's nonstop jokes, but it's played very real and loose, and it has the starkness of a Bergman movie! It's insane, yet it completely works." [14]
