Love and Death and Food: Woody Allen’s Comic Use of Gastronomy
2006; Salisbury University; Volume: 17; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0090-4260
Autores Tópico(s)Theater, Performance, and Music History
ResumoOn the basis of its title alone, Love and Death (1975) seems designed largely as a tribute to some of the lasting achievements of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian culture. Indeed, Woody Allen in this film spoofs (warmly and gently) many of the giants of classical Russian literature, music, and cinema to whom he was indebted for inspiration, ideas, and techniques as a writer and filmmaker. The movie, as a result, contains numerous allusions to Russian artists ranging from Dostoevsky and Tolstoy to Eisenstein and Prokofiev. The score for Love and Death, for example, includes selections from Prokofiev's composition for Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky (1938) as well as from his Lieutenant Kizhe Suite (1934) and Love for Three Oranges (1921);1 cinematic allusions, meanwhile, are made to Eisenstein's Potemkin (1925) and to Bondarchuk's War and Peace (1968). The central target of Allen's parody, however, is the nineteenth-century Russian novel and specifically the loose and baggy monsters of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Set in tsarist Russia during the time of the Napoleonic wars and centered upon a bespectacled hero who plans to murder the French emperor, Love and Death prompts immediate associations, of course, with Tolstoy's classic War and Peace (1869).2 There are distinctively Dostoevskian echoes, on the other hand, in the film's theme of a man sentenced to death and then reprieved at the last moment (The Idiot, 1 868) , in the trio of brothers who make up the Grushenko family (The Brothers Karamazov, 1880), and in the moral dilemma that confronts the hero when, a la Raskolnikov, he contemplates the act of murder (Crime and Punishment, 1866).3 This Dostoevsky connection is humorously laid bare in Allen's film during the jail-cell conversation between Grushenko and his father on the eve of Boris's execution, when names from the titles and heroes of Dostoevsky' s works are called forth in a comic litany of literary reference.4 If the film's artistic and philosophic ambitions are to pay homage to the two towering figures of nineteenth-century Russian literature, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, then the bathos at work in Love and Death-a bathos that repeatedly deflates and reduces the film's serious, elevated ideas-r-calls to mind yet another great nineteenth-century Russian writer: Nikolai Gogol. It is entirely possible that during his younger years, when he took to various Russian, Scandinavian, and German authors, Allen became acquainted with the works of Russia's greatest comic writer.5 The question of direct influence aside, an affinity with Gogol suggests itself in the way that Allen captures the absurdity of human life and the anxieties of modem man, casting them both in a grotesquely comic light. Like Gogol, Allen possesses the gift for humorously deflating the pretensions of his fictional characters- be those pretensions social, political, sexual, or philosophical. One device, common to both Gogol and Allen, for bringing about this comic deflation is the use of food imagery. In Gogol's works, as many critics have noted, the demands of the stomach are invariably made prominent and predominate over those of the heart or head. A central concern of nearly all his fictional characters, especially in the early Ukrainian tales, is how well-and how often- they will be able to satisfy their appetite for food and drink. Indeed, an entire book, Alexander Obolensky's Food-Notes on Gogol (1972), has been written on this very subject.6 Woody Allen, for his part, has written a gastronomic version of from the Underground in his short sketch Notes from the Overfed, a work that derived, in the author's words, from reading Dostoevsky and the new Weight Watchers magazine on the same plane trip.7 Allen has been quoted as saying that he finds all food funny and at one point actually considered calling his Russian film either Love, Food and Death or Love, Death and Food* Gastronomy, therefore, was obviously meant to figure quite prominently in the comic design of this film. …
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