Rifkin's Festival: Woody Allen's Old-Man/Younger-Woman Shtick, With a Sweeter Grace Note
By Karen Gordon
Rating: B-minus
Woody Allen has written and directed a staggering number of feature films. By my count, Rifkin’s Festival, is his 49th film, (and that doesn’t include things he’s done for television, or movies he’s written but not directed.)
Even now in his late eighties Allen’s workaholic tendencies still propel him onward. But, as long time fans of the controversial auteur’s work know, the output has been wildly uneven.
As well, especially in the latter part of his career he’s been recycling many of the plots, themes, and even repeating dialogue. In effect, he is his own genre, and has created his own tropes.
Elena Anaya and Wallace Shawn in Woody Allen’s Rifkin’s Festival.
And that’s very true of his latest. Rifkin’s Festival is a romantic farce, with ideas that long-time fans will recognize from a range of other Allen films, but with one difference. The movie ends on a surprisingly sweet note.
Wallace Shawn is Mort Rifkin, a retired film prof and the much older husband of Sue (Gina Gershon), who runs her own PR company. Mort is trying to write a novel, but is stuck, so he’s come with her to the San Sebastien film festival.
It’s not so much that he’s drawn to the festival. He complains that film festivals are no longer his happy place. Mort, the film prof, knows he’s a snob. He believes the older European masters were the best, and has a gentle contempt for what is featured these days, at film festivals.
But he’s come because he wants to keep an eye on Sue. He suspects that she’s way too fond of her client, Philippe (Louis Garrel), a hot, handsome young director whose movie, with its political themes, is a hit already going into the festival.
Mort isn’t impressed. “Politics is ephemeral,” he tells Sue. “The big questions, the ones that matter are ‘What’s it all about’? Is this all there is. We could have an ideal world politically. but we’d still have these terrifying questions”.
The day after their arrival, Mort has minor chest pains. Friends insist he see a local doctor, Jo Rojas (Elena Anaya). The doc turns out to be a beautiful woman in her thirties, not so happily married to an older man, a famous painter. Mort is smitten.
Suddenly he's less interested in keeping an eye on his wife, and more in finding reasons to see the doctor again. Which, he does, which, in turn fuels his romantic hopes and challenges his ideas about himself.
The questions follow him into sleep. Mort is plagued with dreams where his problems are played out in black and white, in situations based on scenes from movies from classic films, including one where, a la Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, he plays chess with Death, played by Christoph Waltz.
This is vintage Allen: a discontented intellectual, artistic older man, in an ailing marriage, struggles with his own neurosis, creative blocks, existential questions and a fear of death, and hopes his attraction to a younger woman will be returned.
To be honest, I struggled to make it through the movie. I was frustrated with ideas I’ve seen before in Allen’s films, tropes, dialogue, situations, some of which seemed tone-deaf to me as I was watching it.
So, I can’t tell you that this is a terrific film. And yet, when I got to the end of the movie, I was happy I stuck with it.
Allen wraps the film around Mort in session with his psychiatrist. He starts and ends the film telling his shrink the story of what happened at the festival, a pathway to delivering the protagonist’s own version of his arc at the festival.
The film benefits from the cast. Allen’s dialogue, with its highbrow references, often sounds a more like it’s written for a play, or an old-fashioned comedy where there are straight lines as set-up for a caustic comeback.
Snappy dialogue and wry asides are Allen tropes, but it can read as too brittle. However, the two leads do a lot to warm it up. Gershon as Sue is at the festival to do business. She handles the dialogue, even when it’s terse or snappy, with warmth. She treats her husband with affection and respect, even when he’s being frustrating and evasive. Whatever once drew them together as a married couple is long gone, but they seem to like and respect each other, and that’s meaningful here.
As well, there’s something sweet in Shawn’s portrayal of Mort. Who, as we get older, wants to believe that they’re no longer attractive or desirable, or that life no longer holds anything for us that could bring joy? Many people close down to possibilities as they get older, or even to changing their minds. Shawn’s Mort may be self-absorbed, but through his experiences at the festival, he allows himself to be transformed.
Allen isn’t a “message” filmmaker. And yet, now in the final act of his life, the director, who has often made movies suggesting that life inevitably disappoints, has some sweet and encouraging things to say. If this was to be his last film, it is a sweet final thought.
And despite my frustrations, in the end, that’s what’s stayed with me.
Rifkin’s Festival, written and directed by Woody Allen. Starring Gina Gerson, Wallace Shawn, Louis Garrel Elena Anaya, Sergi López. Available to rent on Apple TV+ and other streaming services.