A retired film professor accompanies his wife to the San Sebastián festival while the latter takes care of press relations for a brilliant young French director, with whom she has an affair…
Posted at 9:30 a.m.
Rifkin’s Festival is this feature, 49and opus of a long symphony, which Woody Allen shot in Spain two years ago. Never released theatrically in North America, the film is now available on video on demand, more than a year after opening the San Sebastián festival. The organizers of the event could no doubt be happier at the idea of programming a prestigious evening with a work precisely within the framework of the film festival held each autumn in the Spanish Basque Country.
Nothing is more identifiable than a Woody Allen film and Rifkin’s Festival is no exception. Thanks to the scrolling credits to the sound of a jazzy song as an introduction, the filmmaker immediately plunges the faithful spectator into familiar territory. And always arouses in the latter the hope of discovering a work at the height of those offered by the filmmaker at the time of his greatest days.
Unfortunately, that will not be the case this time around. Even if it constitutes a moment of cinema all in all pleasant, Rifkin’s Festival is to be included in the fringe of the most forgettable films of the author of manhattan. A bit as if Allen had forgotten to put depth in a story where he mechanically mixes the same themes, with characters who sometimes veer into caricature.
There was, however, material to explore in this portrait of an aging man from whom everything escapes – his wife, his power of seduction, his conception of cinema – but the filmmaker preferred to use the tone of a frank comedy. In this regard, the use of pastiches of great classics of European cinema (Jules and Jim, A man and a woman, The seventh seal) becomes a bit too systematic, but some gags still hit their mark. For fans, a film by Woody Allen is always worth watching, even when the veteran filmmaker is on autopilot.
Rifkin’s Festival is available on video on demand in its original version.
Comedy
Rifkin’s Festival
Woody Allen
With Wallace Shawn, Gina Gershon, Louis Garrel
1:31 a.m.