Reds (1981)

Second viewing; first viewed in 1982.

The exploits of John Reed and Louise Bryant, writers and political activists in the first decade of the 20th century, who were eyewitnesses to the Russian Revolution.

Basically a romantic drama about a conventional, conservative relationship between a man and a woman. The comedic ingredient is the discourse surrounding it, full of pretensions to heterodoxy and free-love advocacy. The main couple split and make up repeatedly, much in the same way as in Modern Romance, released that same year, another work which exposes modernity's contradictions. One could consider Reds as a follow-up to Bananas, starring an Allen actress as a sign of acknowledgement. Unlike its predecessor, however, it is not based on a succession of jokes, but rather on a single, very long one in which the punchline is precisely the eventual realization that there isn't going to be one. The revolution itself is filmed in a curiously cursory way, literally as a walk in a square.

Rating: 52 (down from 68)