Thursday, February 3, 2022

Quick Take: Rifkin's Festival

 

I wasn't sure I was allowed to like Rifkin's Festival. For that matter, I'm not sure I was even supposed to watch it. These days, choosing to participate in the release of a Woody Allen film - whether by acting in it or just paying to see it - comes with a built-in moral dilemma. Whatever decision you make, it's somehow considered to reflect your belief about whether the director molested Dylan Farrow.

Frankly, Rifkin's Festival is too lightweight and inoffensive a film to bear that kind of moral weight. At it's best, it evokes the kind of longing and romantic preoccupations that characterized Allen's films of the '70s and '80s.

Mort Rifkin (Wallace Shawn) is a writer and former film studies professor married to a movie industry PR rep (Gina Gershon). He tags along with her to the San Sebastian film festival where she's preoccupied with the young, hot French film director whose PR she handles (Louis Garrel). Rifkin believes Garrel's new film is pretentious and overpraised; he also believes his wife may be having a affair with her client. Feeling a little queasy, he seeks out a doctor, Joanna Rojas (Elena Anaya), who shares his intense love of  classic European film and with whom he begins a rather sweet, wistful flirtation. And when Mort sleeps, his dreams are scenes from his favorite European films, but with his wife, friends and family members playing all the parts.

It's those dream sequences that make the film, skillful reproductions of famous moments from Breathless, 8 1/2, Jules and Jim, The Exterminating Angel and others, but tweaked and played for laughs. The 8 1/2 parody is every bit as visually sumptuous and exciting as the corresponding scene in Fellini's masterwork, and a parody of  Bergman's Persona  - with Gershon and Anaya in tortured, overlapping extreme close-up -  made me laugh out loud twice in the space of about 20 seconds. (It's every bit as funny as the corresponding Persona parody played by Diane Keaton and Jessica Harper in Love and Death, yet the premise is completely different.). 

Shawn is particularly good here, playing what is essentially a stand-in for Allen himself - or at least, the characters Allen used to play. There's more warmth and yearning in his performance than there is neurosis; he makes a potentially very annoying character into a likable and sympathetic man. He and Anaya establish a lovely chemistry that had me seriously rooting for them to wind up together. And the beautiful shots of San Sebastian, Spain only add to the romantic vibe - more great work from cinematographer Vittorio Storaro.

So that's the best of Rifkin's Festival. At its worst... well, its disappointments are pretty much the same as those in most of Allen's decreasingly satisfying recent work.  Too often, the dialogue feels as though it came from a rough draft rather than a finished script, with actors delivering large chunks of plot exposition as if giving junior high book reports on the situations they're portraying. (Douglas McGrath's delivery of the doctor's back story is a particularly glaring example). And even though his characters have cell phones, Allen still hasn't figured out how they actually work. When Shawn asks McGrath for the doctor's home phone number - even though both men are clutching their phones at that moment- McGrath fumbles for a pen and piece of paper to write the number down.)

And that moment with the confusion over the cell phones isn't the only scene in Rifkin's Festival that feels like it was written by your out-of-touch, politically incorrect grandpa. There are throwaway moments here and there that made me cringe a little. (In one, a very attractive young woman - we'd have called her a 'starlet' back in the day - is offered the role of Hannah Arendt by a lascivious film producer. It doesn't play well on this side of the Me Too movement, even though Allen's intentions are benign.)  However, I'm not inclined to quibble over the occasional moments of outdated humor. At 86, Allen is still managing to crank out a movie a year, which is a remarkable thing. He may not have another Annie Hall or Crimes and Misdemeanors in him. But if we can get a few more Rifkin's Festivals, I won't complain.