Possibly one of Woody Allen’s last films, Rifkin’s festival is released in French theaters this Wednesday, July 13. At the heart of this black comedy: the sentimental neuroses of an aging cinema lover, strangely similar to the New York director, singled out from #MeToo. As a start of farewell for the octogenarian, after having recently evoked the thought of putting away his camera definitively.
The director was already struggling to finance his films, but saw the industry almost completely turn his back on him after his adopted daughter Dylan Farrow accused him of sexually abusing her when she was a child. Woody Allen denies these accusations, for which neither of the two investigations launched were successful. Rifkin’s Festivalavailable online and in a few theaters in the United States, will not be released until Wednesday in France, one of the countries where the public is most loyal to the filmmaker, two years after its presentation at the opening of the San Sebastian festival in Spain.
It was also shot on location, with a certain Mort Rifkin, a failed and hypochondriac writer, as the main character. Actor and playwright Wallace Shawn, close to Woody Allen and accustomed to supporting roles, embodies this Jewish intellectual obsessed with women, religion and the meaning of life – a semi-autobiographical character omnipresent in the East Coast filmmaker.
A former film professor, lover of the great European directors of the 20th century and of the New Wave, Rifkin travels to San Sebastian to accompany his wife, Sue (Gina Gershon). He suspects the latter, press officer in the cinema, to maintain an affair with the director in vogue whom she deals with, and for whom he has the greatest contempt, Philippe (Louis Garrel, perfect in the role of the filmmaker head slapping and nonchalant).
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Inevitably, for his part, Mort will fall in love with another woman, Jo (Elena Anaya), a cardiologist much younger than him, whom he will consult under all pretexts, before trying to free her from the grip of her husband, a passionate but violent artist played by Sergi Lopez. At 86, the author ofAnnie Hall and manhattan does not go off the beaten track. The repartee is sometimes tasty, but the situations somewhat hackneyed, in a comedy in the form of a tribute to 20th century European auteur cinema.
The Europeans have arrived, and the films have come of age
Mort Rifkin, played by Wallace Shawn
Bergman, Fellini, Godard, Truffaut, Buñuel… The film is sprinkled with nods to the great directors whom Woody Allen venerates, he who makes his character say, sorry for contemporary cinematographic production, that in the history of movie theater, “the Europeans have arrived, and the films have become adults”. Allen himself appeared weary, during an interview given to actor Alec Baldwin, on the latter’s Instagram account, at the end of June, where he did not rule out his 50th film, which he must shoot in Paris in September, the last.
“I’ll probably do that extra movie but a lot of the excitement has evaporated”he blurted out. “I don’t have as much fun making a film and having it shown on the big screen anymore”, he added, referring to the arrival of streaming. Is Woody Allen like the character of Rifkin’s Festivaloverwhelmed by developments in the world around him, and only finding refuge in the classics of the 7th art?
In the film, Rifkin dreams, in black and white, replaying in pastiche mode cult scenes from his favorite films, from Jules and Jim at A man and a womanuntil ending up, as in The Seventh Seal, to play chess with death (played by Christoph Waltz)… who enjoins him to watch his cholesterol to postpone the deadline! Crossed during a private screening of the film in Paris, the director Claude Lelouch smiled at the impertinent homage made by the New Yorker to his cinema: “He dares everything!”he summed up, leaving the session.