Annie Hall was the 'breakout' film for Woody Allen as a director. The film won four Academy awards including best picture/director and saw Allen move away from the freewheeling comedy films he was best known for at the time. Annie Hall is essentially about the relationship between Alvy Singer (Allen), a typically neurotic Allen character, in this case a comedian, and aspiring singer Annie Hall, played by Diane keaton in an Oscar winning performance. The film is in many ways the archetypal Woody Allen film, a nostalgic romantic comedy that uses the city of New York to great effect like an extra character almost. Allen used many different techniques in the film including flashbacks, animation, subtitles to indicate what the characters really mean, and dialogue spoken directly to the camera. Even split-screen is used at one point to show the differences and prejudices between Alvy and Annie's family. Annie Hall begins with Allen speaking straight to the camera as Alvy. The scene is an immediate indication that Allen has moved on and is seeking to make a different type of picture with more ambition. Alvy's very Woody Allen concerns give us an insight into his character and make an arresting beginning;

"There's an old joke - um... two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of 'em says, "Boy, the food at this place is really terrible." The other one says, "Yeah, I know; and such small portions." Well, that's essentially how I feel about life - full of loneliness, and misery, and suffering, and unhappiness, and it's all over much too quickly."

The film has a loose, spontaneous structure and this approach works well in the finished product. I presume that there is autobiographical material in the film but how much is anyone's guess. Allen has always claimed that this element is greatly overplayed in his films by critics but he did go out with Diane Keaton for real in the seventies and was a stand-up comic so it's understandable that audiences saw Annie Hall as a window into his life and autobiographical. What the structure does do though is introduce an element of realism into the film, a new quality for a film directed by Allen at the time - although you couldn't really call Annie Hall a conventional film.

The flashbacks allow Allen to show moments from Alvy's childhood and introduce us to former wives and girlfriends. It doesn't come as a huge suprise to learn that the young Alvy was a strange child obsessed with the notion that the universe is expanding beyond breaking point. There are also nice, offbeat touches like making the young Alvy's home beneath a rollercoaster ride - we see plates and cups wobble at the dinner table as the child Alvy eats. As Alvy is a comdedian Allen includes several secenes where Alvy is on a chat show or performing a stand-up routine or speaking engagment. These clips are essentially Woody himself (one literally is a real clip of Allen on a talk show) and he includes actual material from his days as a stand-up;

"I was thrown out of N.Y.U. my freshman year for cheating on my metaphysics final, you know. I looked within the soul of the boy sitting next to me. When I was thrown out, my mother, who was an emotionally high-strung woman, locked herself in the bathroom and took an overdose of Mah-Jongg tiles. I was depressed at that time. I was in analysis. I was suicidal as a matter of fact and would have killed myself, but I was in analysis with a strict Freudian, and, if you kill yourself, they make you pay for the sessions you miss."

The central component of this often loose and episodic film is the relationship between Alvy and Annie Hall. Diane Keaton is an absolute delight as the kooky and bohemian Annie and brings her usual charm and comic chemistry with Woody Allen to the film. There is a great scene where they chat on a rooftop balcony and their conversation is subtitled to express their true thoughts. Both maintain a superficial conversation about photography as the subtitles reveal they both fear they are making fools of themselves by pontificatiing on a subject they have no real knowledge on. Later Annie and a few friends attempt to persude Alvy to take cocaine with expensive and predictably funny consequences. The romance between Alvy and Annie is nicely done and enjoyable because watching Allen and Keaton together is always a delight. The romance is realistically developed from a first meeting and moves on to problems that occur when people move in with each other and how people can drift apart because they each want different things from life. There are some lovely scenes between them and of course they are very funny together onscreen. "Why don't you take sodium pentothal? Then you could sleep through the whole thing!" cracks Alvy at Annie's penchant for getting stoned before they have sex.

Annie's tentative early performance as a singer eventually leads to a trip to Los Angeles and the culture clash between that city and New York allows Woody Allen to make some very funny digs and wisecracks about the place. Annie is there because of the interest of a slightly cheesy record producer played by Paul Simon, his character a possible snipe by Allen at Warren Beatty (who was romantically linked to Diane Keaton in real life). Annie starts to like the idea of a new life there and we see how great an actress Diane Keaton could be as she evolves from the ditzy Annie of earlier in the film to give a confident performance as a singer that contrasts vastly with her previous performance.

Alvy, meanwhile, in some of the funniest scenes in the film, ducks out of a television show, discovers that tv sitcoms have a laughter machine where they can add canned laughs to any scene or moment ("Do they have booing on that?" he asks) and has a hlarious encounter with a traffic policeman. "What's with all these awards?" he groans about Los Angeles. "They're always giving out awards. Best Fascist Dictator: Adolf Hitler!" The clash between Los Angeles with its hip, seventies, laid-back, druggy, permanently sunlit distractions and Alvy is probably the most enjoyable part of the film for me and very funny. On arrival on a scorching day at Christmas, Alvy wryly remarks that Santa Claus is in danger of getting sunstroke. There are about a gazillion classic Allen lines peppered throughout Annie Hall. Alvy's digs at the new enviroment that Annie is tempted by also reveal a recognition by the character that he is too uptight and wracked by guilt to ever be able to let himself go and join her there in that lifestyle.

Close to being the quintessential Woody Allen film, Annie Hall is highly recommended. In fact the only minor drawback is the absence of a soundtrack in the film apart from source music. Woody was deep into his Ingmar Bergman influence at the time and decided he would copy his hero by eliminating a traditional music score. Thankfully, he decided this wasn't for him and music soon became a vital component in his work again.

The film is very quotable and includes far too many lines and great moments to mention. "I had heard that "Commentary" and "Dissent" had merged and formed "Dysentery," says Alvy at one point. Very few, if any, comic writers can maintain such a strike-rate throughout a film. Overall, Annie Hall is a richly enjoyable film for Woody Allen fans and accessible and funny enough to appeal to general audiences. It has a great cast and in addition to Allen and Keaton includes Shelly Duvall, Colleen Dewhurst, Tony Roberts and a young Christopher Walken.

Oh, and Marshall McLuhan and Truman Capote are used by the director in clever and funny cameos.

As ever with Woody Allen expect only a basic DVD package.