Woody Allen makes an unexpected retreat, taking along his eyeglasses and neuroses, to Russia of the Napoleonic era and to the social circles charted by Tolstoi, Turgenev, others. He presides over more props, more extras, more budget than ever before (the movie was shot, furthermore, in Paris and Budapest); but all this seems not to have swollen his head. Where classic Russian films often advance no strong individual characters and classic Russian novels advance a dozen or so, Allen limits himself, as before, to just one -- himself. (He charitably gives a fair share of good lines to Diane Keaton, and she has acquired considerable knowledge of how to handle them.) Allen's spoofs of his established superiors -- Eisenstein, Bergman, Dostoevski -- are just fizzle most of the time, hare-brained schoolboy impertinence. But they lend the movie a High Art ambience, unlike Allen's previous Pop Culture stuff, and this serves to better set off the chronic facetiousness which he maintains out of self-defense, self-deprecation, and general self-centeredness, while he wages his unending search for a great lay. Photographed by Ghislain Cloquet. (1975) — Duncan Shepherd
This movie is not currently in theaters.