Producers: Letty Aronson, Erika Aronson and Jaume Roures Director: Woody Allen Screenplay: Woody Allen Cast: Wallace Shawn, Gina Gershon, Christoph Waltz, Louis Garrel, Elena Anaya, Sergi López, Steve Guttenberg, Richard Kind, Tammy Blanchard, Douglas McGrath, Georgina Amorós, Nathalie Poza, Iñigo Etxebeste and Enrique Arce Distributor: MPI Media Group
Grade: C
Despite the scandalous allegations surrounding his personal life, Woody Allen continues to make films, and “Rifkin’s Festival,” his forty-ninth, is fairly typical of them: it’s a pale reflection of Allen’s earlier work, depending too much on stale cinematic references and featuring only a smattering of the clever lines that used to be his stock in trade; but in its easygoing, almost flaccid way it manages to be sporadically amusing.
The inevitable Allen surrogate this time around is Mort Rifkin (Wallace Shawn), an ex-film studies teacher and aspiring novelist, though he’s not been able to finish a single page that meets his standard of a masterpiece-in-the-making. Shawn, of course, doesn’t possess the nervous energy of other actors Allen has used as his virtual mouthpieces, most of whom have tried, with varying degrees of success, to emulate Allen’s nattering persona—instead he’s a shambling, slow-moving version of himself. But his naturally grumpy, pessimistic demeanor fits the character, who’s going through an existential crisis of the sort Allen’s protagonists have always confronted.
Mort narrates the picture as a conversation with his psychiatrist, telling the therapist of his recent trip to the San Sebastián Film Festival with his wife Sue (Gina Gershon), a publicist who’s there to shepherd around her client Philippe (Louis Garrel), a young director whose new film is widely celebrated. Rifkin dismisses contemporary movies, exalting the great films of the past by luminaries such as Bergman, Buñuel, Fellini, Goddard, Truffaut and Welles. He’s pained as much by going to festival events as he is when he’s left alone to reflect on the fact that Sue is probably having an affair with Philippe.
He’s so distressed that he begins to believe he’s having chest pains, which leads him to visit Dr. Jo Rojas (Elena Anaya), whom he finds so attractive he starts manufacturing ailments to consult her again. It turns out she’s unhappy in her marriage, too; her husband Paco (Sergi López) is a wild artist prone to infidelity with his models. The two strike up a friendship, taking sightseeing trips and visiting local markets, and though he offers himself as a sounding board for her problems, he also imagines the relationship could go deeper, especially when his suspicions about Sue prove well founded.
There’s an autumnal, wistful feel to the movie, because the festival Rifkin’s attending isn’t so much at San Sebastián as in his own mind, in the form of dreams in which his life is reimagined in the form of reworked homages to the films that he loves. So we get parodies of scenes from classics like “8½,” “Breathless,” “Jules and Jim,” “The Seventh Seal” and “Citizen Kane,” among others, shot in black-and-white as a contrast to the brightly-lit (indeed, at times excessively glossed-up) color cinematography of Vittorio Storaro. These, along with some nods to Allen’s own earlier films, turn the picture into a sort of test in which the viewer is invited to demonstrate his knowledge by identifying all the references. (It would have helped, however, if the sequences had been more cleverly written and staged. One of them does, however, give Christoph Waltz the opportunity to play the role for which he might have been born, and to deliver some of Allen’s most typically philosophical lines.)
Allen’s direction seems even more lackadaisical than formerly; many scenes are sluggishly staged, and Alisa Lepselter’s ponderous editing adds to the plodding feel. But the pacing does feel of a piece with Shawn’s unforced style. Of the rest, Gershon and especially Anaya find more in their roles than one might expect, and Garrel offers a nice take on a pretentious auteur. The rest of the cast simply fill in the slots, and some of their line readings are terribly flat—though that might be the fault of the lines. The touristy San Sebastián locales are lovely, though, even when Storaro overdoes the color contrast, and Stephane Wrembel contributes a score that enlivens some pretty dead moments.
This “Festival” is a basically a series of riffs that fall flat as often as they strike sparks. But amid the longueurs there are some minor gems to be found. Like Rifkin’s dreams, though, they are likely to evoke memories of better moments—in this case, from Allen’s superior films.