Back in the good old days when Woody Allen was funny, along came this minor gem of a satire on US-supported, Latin-American military dictatorships: Amusing with a few laugh-out-loud moments here. The film tends to go for absurdist and cartoonish slapstick rather than political humor. ALLEN had still to learn how to make his funny one-liners fit a more solid plot structure.
Despite the background, this film is really about an odd fact of sexual relationships in Western culture; namely, that the concept of give and take only works in business and not in personal relationships, despite the belief that business can be conflated with pleasure. This fact helps explain all of Woody ALLEN's best movies in their relentlessly-funny depictions of sexual, emotional and intellectual failure.
What went wrong with ALLEN is when he started taking his personal failings seriously and thinking these could be used to make good drama when they only result in self-indulgence and pretension.
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