Plot
When Napoleon Bonaparte (James Tolkan) invades the Russian Empire during the Napoleonic wars, Boris Grushenko (Woody Allen), a coward and pacifist scholar, is forced to enlist in the Russian Army, desperate and disappointed hearing the news that Sonja (Diane Keaton), his cousin twice removed, is to wed a herring merchant. He inadvertently captures a group of enemy soldiers, but to no avail, as the French army reaches Moscow immediately afterward. He returns and marries the recently-widowed Sonja (who does not want to marry Boris, but promises him that she will when she thinks that he is about to be killed in a duel), a marriage filled with philosophical debates, and no money. Boris thinks that the French invasion of Moscow should put an end to the war. His narcissistic wife, angered that the invasion will interfere with their plans to start a family that year, conceives a plot to assassinate Napoleon at his quarters. Boris and Sonja debate the matter with some degree of philosophical double-talk, and Boris reluctantly goes along with it. Sonja escapes arrest while Boris is executed despite being told by a vision that he will manage to escape.
Read more about this topic: Love And Death
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