Rifkin’s Festival Review: Woody Allen’s Complacently Tossed-Off Misfire

As Rifkin’s Festival drones on, the wastefulness grows offensive in a manner that’s unusual even for Allen’s misfires.

Rifkin’s Festival
Photo: MPI Media Group

Decades into his iconic career, Woody Allen is still fixated on wannabe intellectual artists obsessively grappling with the meaninglessness of life as they have dalliances with much younger women who’re yearning for passion. That scenario was curdling into shtick some 40 years ago, but it at least felt personal to Allen in his salad days, when he was determined to fuse the existential agony of the films made by his heroes with his own scrappy, impertinent stand-up spirit. Now Allen is seemingly filming whatever writing spills from his typewriter, which is more often than not a copy of a copy of a copy of past hits, material so anachronistic and contrived that it feels closer to ritual than art.

Mort Rifkin (Wallace Shawn) is a retired film studies professor who scolds people for failing to appreciate European auteurs like Bergman, Fellini, Buñuel, and Godard. The septuagenarian also fashions himself an aspiring novelist but refuses to write anything that isn’t the equal of Dostoevsky. To make such a claim, especially as an inexperienced writer, is inherently ludicrous, but such sentiments out of the mouth of a man pushing 80 sound positively delusional. Throughout Rifkin’s Festival, it’s difficult to tell whether Allen sees Mort, a fount of tired, elitist, witticisms, as a man of integrity or a subject of parody.

There’s a seed here for a film that might have a point: What if a Woody Allen clone was stuck in a kind of temporal hell, parroting the same gibberish he’d been spouting for decades, perhaps out of an inability to deal with certain real-life calamities? It’s a gambit that he once had enough nerve and daring to spring, as many of his best films, particularly Husbands and Wives and Deconstructing Harry, are driven by an engine of self-confrontation.

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Now, though, Allen’s male protagonists, more times than not, appear unable to engage with the sensual and spontaneous elements of life because that’s the only problem that he can imagine them suffering from. Rifkin’s age is never explicitly considered because textures of human life rarely matter to Allen anymore. As written, Rifkin could be anywhere from 30 to 90, and he and his wife, Sue (Gina Gershon), have no chemistry or sense of shared history. Shawn and Gershon are gifted artists who appear to have been randomly paired to say lines and call it a day. Even the contours of small talk elude Allen throughout: When the supporting characters speak, they sound as unnatural as the future victims of a grade-Z monster movie.

Rifkin’s Festival abounds in the lazy shorthand that’s been creeping into Allen’s films for years, as the characters exist out of fealty to routine. Women are torn between slick executives and rumpled intellectuals and oversexed artists, while the men grouse on, without apparent irony, about the women’s inability to see their depth of being. Though the film is set at the San Sebastian Film Festival, it could be shot against a blank wall for all the interest that Allen evinces in the Spanish resort city or the miniature communities that spring up at festivals; working with the great Vittorio Storaro, Allen fashions astonishingly beautiful pillow shots that have all the specificity of postcards. Even the talk of cinema is curt and canned, rooted in Allen’s crabby, embarrassingly out-of-date snobs-versus-plebes mentality.

The chief irritation of an off-key Allen film like Rifkin’s Festival is that the filmmaker never allows his characters to surprise themselves or us. A sexy, acclaimed director played by Louis Garrel is as vacuous as you’d expect him to be given the context, while Mort’s young crush and harbinger of what might have been, Jo, is played by Elena Anaya with a predictably angelic nobility. Christoph Waltz and Sergi López, among others, also briefly appear to check off other boxes: the former as a parody of The Seventh Seal’s Death in what may charitably be estimated as the director’s thousandth Bergman reference, and the latter as a stereotypically raging, womanizing Spanish artist a la Javier Bardem’s character from Vicky Cristina Barcelona.

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As Rifkin’s Festival drones on, the wastefulness grows offensive in a manner that’s unusual even for Allen’s misfires. Imagine what an engaged artist could do with a fraction of the resources that Allen not only takes for granted but appears to resent (his privilege, and perhaps his creative purgatory, reside in his apparent ability to wring a European vacation out of any script he writes). At least a smug film like Stardust Memories was invigorated by the visceral force of Allen’s self-righteousness, while self-conscious fantasias like Midnight in Paris and A Rainy Day in New York poignantly suggest an aging artist’s retreat into projections of the past. By contrast, Rifkin’s Festival, stuck somewhere in between real and whimsical Allen modes, is so complacently tossed off that it barely exists.

Score: 
 Cast: Wallace Shawn, Gina Gershon, Louis Garrel, Elena Anaya, Sergi López, Richard Kind, Nathalie Poza, Steve Guttenberg, Tammy Blanchard, Christoph Waltz, Douglas McGrath, Ben Temple, Michael Garvey  Director: Woody Allen  Screenwriter: Woody Allen  Distributor: MPI Media Group  Running Time: 92 min  Rating: PG-13  Year: 2020

Chuck Bowen

Chuck Bowen's writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, The AV Club, Style Weekly, and other publications.

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