The_Film_That_Changed_My_Life

Annie Hall
19
Or it dies and you have a dead shark.
Johnson: “And I think what we got on our hands is a dead shark.” The
opposite can also be true, too. She’s moving, growing, and going forward,
and he’s flopping in the water. We’re aware of their relationship, while she
is giving this beautiful, strong performance on the stage, and with that
context it becomes much more than that. It becomes something very sad,
at least for me.
It’s because she’s singing “Seems Like Old Times.”
Johnson: Exactly, which brings me to the other moment, which is the end
montage of the film, set to the exact same song. It ends with this very bittersweet
moment when they’re each with another person, and they’re on a
street corner. It’s shot very distant from across the street. You see them meet
up with each other and pass. That’s a beautiful sequence for me, because it
contextualizes the relationship in a way that, on the surface, seems to marginalize
it. It’s about as far from the ending of a traditional romantic comedy
as you can get. It almost brushes it off. We start the film with Woody Allen
speaking directly to the camera and our perspective is very immediate; it’s
as though he’s just broken up with this woman. His head is still swimming
with everything. At the end of the film, he has perspective on a relationship
that ended years ago.
There is a reading of the film that says he wins her. In a certain way, she
is his shiksa, but he can’t change her to fit into his worldview no matter
how many books about death he buys her. She ultimately changes; how
does she change him?
Johnson: In a way it feels like fundamentally she doesn’t change. There’s the
line, “Alvy, you’re incapable of enjoying life, you know that? I mean you’re
like New York City. . . . You’re like this island unto yourself.”
Well, first of all, it’s more complicated than that. I think that’s one of the
reasons why the film works. I don’t think you can point directly and say,
“She changed, he didn’t, that was the problem, and that’s why the relationship
didn’t work.” If you look at it, they were fundamentally mismatched
from the beginning. All of our relationships—it’s hard for me to point to
a relationship in my life that wasn’t a fundamental mismatch. That’s what