I bought a big box VHS tape of Annie Hall from HMV in Grafton Street, Dublin with my first ever pay cheque.
For the first time in my adult life I was on a regular wage and would come - unlike Al Pacino - to appreciate the joys of solvency. In his post Scarface world, Al Pacino had been left broke, in debt and almost unemployable. It would be years before his seminal performance in Brian De Palma's maximalist gangster epic would gain recognition. Then he met Diane Keaton. It had been a decade since they had shared the screen together in the Godfather films. Rekindling their flame, Keaton quickly realised how dire in his straits Pacino was, who confessed to her being a financial ignoramus. She joined him for a meeting with an accountant, to whom she professed while stabbing Pacino with her finger, "Do you know who this is? This man is… an idiot! He needs to be saved from himself." That’s right: Annie Hall saved Tony Montana from bankruptcy. Keaton then settled into weeks of reading scripts until she found what she was looking for - a comeback. This is the one you make, she told him. Sea of Love came out in 1989 and was a worldwide hit - Al was back, and hasn’t left the screen since.
Now, Diane has gone. Leaving her leading men to mourn. Star Wars might have changed everything in 1977; but so did Annie Hall that year, winning four Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Actress for Keaton. I’ve known Annie since I was twelve, having first encountered her on the BBC in the early eighties. As a film, it only got funnier as I got older and understood more of the cultural references. Of course, Annie never got older, she became an example of how love works (or doesn't) in the adult world, and how utterly special the opposite sex could be. Despite the tide of John Hughes movies that followed me into my exploding teen '80s, I always seem to come back to Annie’s "La-di-da!" Even when she turned communist in Warren Beatty’s Reds, Diane Keaton was utterly convincing without losing an iota of her effervescence. I still think about that look of momentary longing on her face at the end of that picture.
Woody Allen wrote about her passing, "Only Freud and god know why we broke up." Allen and Keaton remained close friends following their love affair, making eight films together, most of them classics. In the process, they produced one of my favourite double-features: If Annie Hall was the way you hoped all your love affairs began, then Manhattan Murder Mystery was where you hoped they would end up - not in murder, per se! But after decades of togetherness, still challenged by life, and when it comes down to it, still filled with longing for each other.
In the constellation of 70s Cinema we’ve grown up with, we have to face the fact the stars have begun to supernova. It’s a bitter reality that the films of this period - all my adult life foundational comfort food - are now beginning to be shot through with the bittersweet flavour of nostalgia. Woody is about to turn ninety; Warren Beatty is fast approaching the same, with Al only a handful of years behind. But Diane… just never seemed to be old. Some years ago I fell for my own Annie, and she has brought such sunshine into my life. But Keaton will always be the ‘Annie’. Whenever I pop that VHS on (I still have it), as she puts it in her sweet lament at the movie’s climax, "It will always seem like old times… being here with you."
