Rent Love and Death (1975)
3.8 of 5 from 130 ratings
1h 18min
- General info
- Available formats
- Synopsis:
- Cowardly scholar Boris Grushenko (Woody Allen) has the hots for the beautiful Sonja (Diane Keaton), but cold feet for the Napoleonic Wars. Devastated by news of Sonja's plans to wed a foul-smelling herring merchant, Boris enlists in the army only to return home a penniless hero! Finally agreeing to marry him, Sonja settles down with poor Boris to a rich life of philosophy, celibacy and meals of snow. But when the French troops invade Russia and Sonja hatches a zany scheme to assassinate Napoleon, Boris learns - in a hilarious but fatal coup attempt - that God is an underachiever, there are no girls in the afterlife and the Angel of Death just can't be trusted!
- Actors:
- Woody Allen, Diane Keaton, Georges Adet, Frank Adu, Edmond Ardisson, Féodor Atkine, Albert Augier, Yves Barsacq, Lloyd Battista, Jack Berard, Eva Betrand, George Birt, Yves Brainville, Gérard Buhr, Brian Coburn, Henri Coutet, Patricia Crown, Henri Czarniak, Despo Diamantidou, Sandor Elès
- Directors:
- Woody Allen
- Producers:
- Charles H. Joffe
- Voiced By:
- Norman Rose
- Writers:
- Woody Allen
- Studio:
- MGM
- Genres:
- Classics, Comedy
- Collections:
- 21 Reasons to Love... Ingmar Bergman: Part 2, A History of Soviet Silent Cinema, inema Paradiso's 2023 Centenary Club: Part 2, Romantic Film Pairings for Valentine's Day
- BBFC:
- Release Date:
- 03/10/2016
- Run Time:
- 85 minutes
- Languages:
- English Dolby Digital 1.0
- Subtitles:
- English Hard of Hearing
- Formats:
- Pal
- Aspect Ratio:
- Widescreen 1.85:1
- Colour:
- Colour
- BLU-RAY Regions:
- B
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Reviews (1) of Love and Death
Woody reveals his favourite Russian authors. - Love and Death review by Steve
Love and Death was a slight backward step after Sleeper, being episodic and a little erratic. But it's still funny and terrifically entertaining, and benefitted from the photography of Ghislain Cloquet (who would win an Oscar for Tess) and music from Prokofiev.
It is a satire inspired by the giants of Russian literature, particularly Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov but visually this is very much a comic tribute to Ingmar Bergman (which he makes explicit at the end when he melts a face and a profile into one image like in Persona.
Woody and Diane Keaton suffer famine and existential trauma, fight a duel and plan to assassinate Napoleon. It's a series of sketches, and some hit and some don't, but the two leads make it fun. They were the great comedy stars of the seventies.
This film lies at the extreme of Woody's habit of parodying East Coast intellectualism and then puncturing its pretentiousness with a low joke. There is a lot of this in Love and Death and periodic discussions of philosophy and the absurdity of Being in an indifferent cosmos: 'All men go eventually, but I go six o'clock tomorrow morning. I was supposed to go at five o'clock but I have a smart lawyer.' So Woody gets to look clever and funny. And to be fair, there are a lot of great jokes in there.
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