Baying Through Russia

By Stefan Kanfer

LOVE AND DEATH

Directed and Written by WOODY ALLEN

"Everyone has to go some time," sighs the condemned man. "I have to go at 6 a.m. It was 5 a.m., but I have a good lawyer."

The speaker could only be Woody Allen, disguised this time as Boris, a 19th century Slav. The label reads "Made in Czarist Russia," but the contents show Allen's familiar shlemiel ticket: the loser, surrounded by a world of hostile, if inanimate, objects.

Seated in his cell, the prisoner has two hours to review his life. He pans it. As a boy, Boris has a vision of Death. The embryo philosopher immediately penetrated to the heart of the mystery. What happens after life? He demanded. For example, are there girls? As Boris matures he embraces three things: cowardice, ineptitude and women. "My room at midnight," a countess breathes in his ear. "Perfect," returns the hero. "Will you be there too?"

One-Liners. Neither mistresses nor the fact that he kept a light on in his room until he was 30 is enough to keep the coward from combat. It is on the battlefield, with some astonishingly evocative camera work, that the director-writer-star sends up Russian literature and never lets it come down. It is as if one of Isaac Bashevis Singer's Hasidic schoolboys were managing Tolstoy's estate and Dostoevsky's psychoses. The Brothers Karamazov meet the Brothers Marx; the epic of War and Peace is reduced to a battle of church and shtetl; Boris scatters Yiddishisms and one-liners all the way back to St. Petersburg and the girl he loves like a brothel.

She is Sonja (Diane Keaton), an arouseful little blouseful who confesses that she has been faithful to the male population west of Minsk. The lovers are poor but wretched, living only on snow and an occasional treat of sleet. To relieve the chill, they engage in those favorite occupations of Russian novelists, the epistemological debate and the religious monologue. "Socrates is a man; all men are mortal; therefore all men are Socrates," concludes Boris. It is this kind of syllogism that moves him to assassinate Napoleon, an adventure that ends, of course, with the wrong man slain. No matter. A celestial sign appears and Boris trills: "I will run, not walk through the valley of the shadow of death. . . I will dwell in the house of the Lord for six months with an option to buy. . ."

Two Keatons. It must be said that at bottom--which is exactly 5 ft. 6 in. from the top--Allen has not altered in technique since his earliest films. The only plot that ever concerns him is the one in which he will be buried. His persona is still the kind of man whose profile should not be painted but wallpapered. His situations continue to bear traces of two Keatons. In this case, Buster is the right source; Diane is not. Allen's longtime companion is saddled with Lines that make her Groucho in bombazine ("Thank you, your grubbiness"). Because she cannot generate a style of her own, Keaton soon draws attention to the film maker's weakness: his movies, populated solely with Woody Allens, are like Walt Disney's old Goofy cartoons, in which every character assumed the lineaments of the hero.

Even so, there can never be a true surplus of Woody Allen. The man is perhaps the most inventive clown since the days of the silents. Indeed, much of the movie could be played without a sound track. With such assets, it seems a pity that too much of Allen's comedy, with its incessant references to delicatessen, Jewish parents and neurotic hang-ups, remains on the streets of Manhattan.

It is, evidently, the price one pays for an Allen comedy. It is worth the fee. For unlike his closest cinematic competitor, Mel Brooks, Allen aims his custard pies up, not down. If his humor is merciless, it is not unkind; Boris' angry monologues with God are closer to Fiddler on the Roof than to comic on the make. The same affection courses through his parodies of Fellini and Bergman and of Pierre at Borodino. In mocking classics, in touching on the topics of religion and mortality, Allen has drawn laughter where there was silence and mustaches where there were faces.

Father Ronald Knox once observed, "The humorist runs with the hare; the satirist hunts with the hounds." Baying through this Russian blizzard of hilarity, Woody Allen, former rabbit, is at least trying to create a beagle. The fact that most of the time it comes out bagel should not discourage him. In any Allen film there can be only one winner: the viewer. . Stefan Kanfer

Allen has a book out too. Without Feathers (Random House; $7.95) is a series of sketches that show the author as a gentle practitioner of the short-haired shaggy-dog story. Most of them should be read as experiments rather than as polished pieces of comic ingenuity. One essay, for example, "If the Impressionists Had Been Dentists," imagines that Vincent Van Gogh is a dentist obsessed with bridgework and X rays as art for art's sake.

Few of the miscellaneous jottings and parodies are as hilarious as Love and Death. Allen offers a menagerie of mythical beasts: the Great Roe has "the head of a lion and the body of a lion, though not the same lion." "The Whore of Mensa" wittily plays with the idea of a brothel for intellectual entertainment. The madam has a master's degree in comparative literature; for a price, a curvaceous Vassar student can be had for an hour's chat about Herman Melville; "symbolism is extra."

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