Poge Six THE MICHIGAN DAILY Saturday, July 12, 1975 'Love and Death: Comedy of tears By DAVID BLOMQUIST American show business admittedly American dramatic culture has always lacks an active tradition of producing seemed to classify comedy as the vile, intelligent farce. Much of our so-called black sheep-like offspring of an other- comedy has been the banal, mindless wise firmly staid theatrical history. Over sort of stuff that today serves as a main- the last half century, drama scholars stay of commercial television. have designated fewer than 10 comedies But when a thoughtful and creative as worthy of the highly respected Pulitzer comic work like Woody Allen's Love and Prize. And since 1960, only two comedy Death comes along, it is a pity that the films have received the "best picture" monstrous reputation of comedy past Academy Award. so often buries the artistic credit of - - ------ - comedy present. For theatre presented with a light droll touch, as Moliere and Shaw certainly knew, can be an excit- r e ingly different vehicle for literary com- munication. Allen demonstrates in Love and Death '9rt ing a solid grasp of this matchless satirical potential. In fact, his new release marks a striking maturation from a wry night- Underw r club performer turning out entertaining but empty films on such enlightening topics as a stolen formula for egg salad By MARNIE HEYN to an influential philosopher and inno- She dives toward the front door; the vative filmmaker whose long-term im- porch steps flex under her feet. Heat pact on the motion picture may be just waves slide off the board-ends in her beginning. wake, sighing into the buffer state be- Allen's expressed concepts of the tween lawn and flower bed at this final broadest human emotional experiences- existential insult. love and death-are neither especially Morning glories, closed, tick against new or remarkably revealing. His two the aluminum clapboard; her key writhes principal characters-Boris and Sonja- between hand and lock, less tool, more search throughout the film for some magnet, tugging her and the house into more definite explanation of man's pur- union. The tumblers turn over; the house pose in life, but locate only random parts before her, and drinks her in. The threads that in the end add up to little door resumes its surface tension. The more than gibberish. eye of the porch light turns inward to the Boris, played by Allen, is an awkward hall. and extremely shy peasant in the back- In aqueous humor, she paddles across ward Russia of Alexander I-a divided the algae wool down the narrow cavern nation desperately attempting to meet toward her kitchen, past the dark pool the threat of Napoleon's invading French of the living room. Her husband and two army. Even before a capricious fate sons, under glass, peer at the sudden forces him to join the hopelessly ill- movement with the deceptive clarity of equipped Russian army, Boris begins to submarine vision. Little currents of the question his spiritual identity and seek scent of furniture oil eddy around the some form of philosophical resolution of conch legs, ripple back to stasis once his inner ecclesiastical doubts and con- her turbulence is gone. flicts. Her kitchen waits impatiently for Allen's view of the innocent Boris at breakfast as a child waits for Christmas: war assumes a strangely Brechtian as- doing odd jobs to earn money to buy pect, with out-of-place touches of irrev- presents. She has learned to be proud of erence and sarcasm forming a touch her room. Of course, there are new of bitterly sick humor that permeates cupboards now, all the way from the the death-filled sequence. Cheerleaders, back door to the double-door fridge. Ev- carrying colored pom-poms and mega- erything is built in, recessed; when she phones neatly marked "Russia," stand does dishes, cartons of odd paper- amidst the cannons and cavalry mouth- leaflets, datebooks, pamphlets, mailers, ing absurd fight songs, while a presum- brochures, postcards with exotic stamps ably dead man chats amiably with Boris - no longer lap at their ankles; the drift- about the settlement of his estate. wood veneer behaves with more de- Yet Boris-probably the least prepared corum. private among the Czar's troops-not only Her files had been moved, originally to survives the ordeal of the unfamiliar the outside fin-de-siecle food closet wed- battlefield, but, in a truly ironic move, ged between cellar stairs and back stairs. emerges as a war hero as the conse- Then, when the closet became the mod- quence of an outlandishly staged "acci- ern pantry with flower sink, her paper an- dent." Why has he been chosen to live nex was shifted to the prefab pantry- when fate has decreed that so many way between back door and garage door. others must die?, Boris seems to ask. Now her archives subside in the tool And after he leaves the battleefield and shed, out of sight, ink puddled, staples returns to country life, the same queer rusted, correspondents lost. The air conditioner kicks, turns over; the pebble-textured silicate flooring set- tles under her sinking arches. Her cof- fee is inventorie; in its aluminum per- colator basket: her eggs in their special rack in the right-hand door of the fridge; her whole wheat bread, her honey wait on the enameled yellow tray. She has laid tomorrow out: her attention may un- dulate until the leaky sun makes the house tingle. She strokes the wall, and illumination flows up the back stairs; she extends and contracts long muscles across the treads, passing mirrors, some utilitarian. Her scale finds her the same. Her skirts drift aromd her ankles toward the floor. She presses down a laver, and carbon filaments fade and cool. She ascends the foam mattress and floats, belly up on the bed. Even the moon light misses her: it trickles down the wall next to the lightl table. Marnie Heyn is the former Edi- torial Director of The Daily. Woody pattern again appears. Challenged to a duel by a superior marksman, Boris escapes with just two shoulder wounds-. one self-inflicted. Later, a would-be assas- sin's knife whizzes past him and lodges safely into the molding around a door. Thus again and again he poses the same question to his wife, Sonja (played by Diane Keaton): Is there a God? Does Hell actually exist? What happens after death? They trade a few chic psycho- logical phrases back and forth, but can- not form any satisfying conclusion-or, for that matter, any conclusion at all. Yet even though Boris and Sonja's exploration of metaphysics is largely in vain, it is not entirely futile. Through their quixotic adventures, Allen seems to be momentarily implying that there are some philosophical questions for which we cannot hope to find an answer. The nature of sentiment and, indeed, life itself are apparently among the abstract ideas he classifies as beyond the com- prehension abilities of the human mind. Finally, after a bizarre series of inci- dents, Boris is convicted of murder and is sentenced to die. Sitting in his dimly lit prison cell, he goes over the puzzling structure one last time-although again to no avail. But in the midst of these last deliberations, a mysterious shadow calling itself his "guardian angel" ap- pears on the .cell wal and informs. him that all is indeed well: the "angel" has arranged for Boris to receive a last- minute government reprieve. And so Boris marches out to the exe- cution ground, happy, light-headed, and totally unafraid. He is convinced that God-or some other high spiritual author- ity-exists and has once again decreed that he, Boris, will be permitted to live when less fortunate (less blessed?) souls would be relegated to death. The soldiers line up and load their rifles. No sign of a reprieve. Boris's con- fidence wavers slightly. The commander gives the order to aim. Still no sign of a reprieve. Symptoms of panic begin to appear on Boris's face. The squad fires. No reprieve. "If there's a God, he's an under- achiever," Boris notes, somewhat maso- chistically. It is an unusually fatalistic turn for Woody Allen. In Sleeper, Allen and Keaton finally defeated the mam- moth fascist government that dominated the 21st century United States. But in Love and Death, Allen includes no sim- ilar giant killing antics in the final frames. With a striking show of force, a powerful Goliath dashes the dreams of the helpless challenger. To accommodate this somewhat more desolate philosophical approach, Allen u s e s a markedly different cinematic scheme in Love and Death than in his preceding pictures. Entire sequences of Sleeper, for example, consisted entirely of "master" (i.e. general) and medium- distance shots. Characters o f t e n re- mained distant and somewhat static, be- cause we had no intimate film contact with them. In his new film, however, Allen seems to place greater emphasis on the tight close-up. Faces and expressions suddenly become important and no longer subtle contributors to the artistic process. And consequently, the characters in Love and Death assume less constrained and more portrait-like images. Naturally, Allen's quick-paced script features a wide assortment of the zany sight and language gags on which his comic reputation is based. And he and Keaton continue to be the best male- female comedy team in American show business since George Burns and Gracie Allen. But beyond all the crazy jokes, the pratfall humor, and the slapstick "busi- ness," there is still an eerie sense of moral inversion that dominates Love and Death from the very beginning and towers over it by the final reel. Outwardly, Boris nee Allen seems to leave the door open to some kind of hope for mant-hat- the recurring dream of eternal life may, far some, be a partial reality. Yet only the nagging reciprocal of that argument seens to prevail at the end: the individual -with hopes and dreams can actually look forward to nothing but harsh reality and shattered visions. It is this perverse and perlexing dicho- tomy that raises Love and Death above the level of the traditional comedy and makes it an unusually introspective piece of American entertainment. David Blomquist is The D a i I y Arts and Entertainment Editor.