Müpa FilmClub: Love and Death (1975)
"I took part in a speedy reading course. I read War and Peace in less than twenty minutes. It's about the Russians.” (Woody Allen)
Clearly, Woody Allen is not a parodist. However, as a writer and director, he makes great parodies. His work is different from that of his colleagues, such as Mel Brooks, Jim Abrahams and David Zucker, who have made parodies of hit films and hit genres. Woody Allen's world is slightly more complicated.
Schedule
At first glance, Love and Death is a parody of War and Peace. However, apart from Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky is also on the agenda, sometimes with a little Pushkin, a bite of Turgenev. Then our heroes sometimes engage in complicated philosophical discussions, and manage to become perfectly entangled. The film occasionally switches to silent film burlesque, to give us a breather before we enter the world of Ingmar Bergman. Complete intellectual disorder. It is not necessarily for those who want to conquer the peaks of fiction literature with a speedy reading course. Even if someone missed the classics of Russian literature, they will not be disappointed because Woody Allen's film works like This Is How You Write by Karinthy. It is not, of course, a complete representation of 19th-century Russian literature, but the character of Boris Grushenko, for example, as portrayed by Woody Allen, reflects with almost literary historical accuracy the type of "superfluous man” presented by many Russian writers. It is to Woody Allen's credit that, under his hands, parodied works and creators are not devalued in the slightest. Not like the culture snobs. This line would even be reinforced later in Allen's films. It is particularly noteworthy how Boris gets lost in a logical deduction about Socrates. Indeed. And let's not forget either that Prokofiev's music is playing.
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