Woody Allen’s neurotic and somewhat eccentric schmuck is perhaps one of the most beloved screen images only next to Chaplin’s tramp. In almost all of Allen’s films we’ve come across the phobic, insecure, underachieving intellectual though there is always an eerie feeling regarding the proportion of reality in that screen projection.

Annie Hall is a film where Allen treads dangerously on the thin line dividing fact and fiction. Though it is nothing even remotely like a biopic, but there is always a kind of excess that suggests however subtly that some of the scenes might have been enacted previously, may be a little in a different way, for real. The film marks Allen’s shift from a stand up comedian to one of the most brilliant and thinking minds working behind a camera in modern times.

The story is about Alvy Singer played by Allen who is painfully aware of his unique personality as a New Yorker, a liberal, a Jew, an intellectual, a hunter of the inaccessible, who makes it a point that the object remains inaccessible. The film follows his antics through an on and off relationship phase with aspirant singer Annie Hall, played by Diane Keaton who definitely delivers a performance of a lifetime. What comes out in the process is a unique blend of nostalgia, romance and sentiments where Woody Allen finds himself as a loner in the crowd trying to come to terms with the impossibility of a relationship as well its absence from life.