Relationships need to come with subtitles.

It's a simple truth, echoed by millions of us around the world, but it took a neurotic New York-lovin Jewish stand-up comic to make a movie for us to realise it. He equipped a dating pair with subtitles, translating their meanings hilariously on screen as if they were speaking in different tongues. Which, of course, they are.

Like all of Woody Allen's humour, it's funny because it's true.

Often painfully, pathetically true -- but factual nevertheless. Somewhere in his dialogue-heavy and frequently futile look at life and all the various ways it can possibly go wrong, Allen's recurring on-screen alter ego is an echo of our inner paranoiac, a man who wants to be simultaneously exclusive and inclusive -- brilliantly summed up, via a paraphrasing of Groucho Marx, in the film's straight-to-camera opening.

Allen plays Alvy Singer, a comedian attracted to the ditsy and lovely Annie Hall, played by Diane Keaton. The two are extremely passionate about each other -- "Love is too weak a word for what I feel -- I luuurve you, you know, I loave you, I luff you, two F's, yes, I have to invent," gushes Alvy -- and yet, as we learn through the film's constant flashbacking through their lives and loves, their relationship inevitably sours as they realise they inhabit different worlds and want different things.

Failing in a last-ditch dramatic effort to win Annie back, Alvy eventually seeks refuge in his typewriter, crafting a play out of his relationship but one that ends with 'him' winning 'her' back.

The film is a hysterically funny albeit complex look at life, relationships and preconceived notions of the same, and while Allen seems to be setting it all up for the punchline, the occasional blow is often as poignant as the laugh is loud.

In this wonderful scene, Alvy and Annie are standing in line for a movie, driven to bickering because of the incessant chatter behind them. Alvy can't help listening to the pretentious man wax ignorant right behind him, and, after breaking the fourth wall and taking his complaint to the audience, resolving it in delightful fashion.

Click here for the video.

"Boy, if only life here were like this," smiles a wistful Allen at the end of the scene. Sir, if only more movies were half as good as this.

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