Cafe Society

The film ends on a shot of the back of hero Bobby’s head, framed by a black proscenium arch, as he pauses in the New Year’s Eve celebration at his Manhattan nightclub. The arch reminds us life is theatre. 

The shot evokes its antithesis at the end of Manhattan: Allen’s Alvy Singer’s open face as he contemplates his young lover’s (Mariel Hemingway as Tracy) departure for study in London and its threat to their romantic future. Of course, the latter shot was itself a replication of/homage to Chaplin’s close to City Lights. There the close-up on the tramp’s face projects his roiling mix of pride that his beloved blind flower girl can now see and resignation that her vision has dispelled her romantic delusions about him. “Yes, I can see,” she admits, dashed. Similarly, Allen ends The Purple Rose of Cairo on a close-up of Mia Farrow's face as she returns to the refuge of romantic cinema, her hopes for a fuller life dashed by her loss of both her fictional ideal man ("Nobody's perfect") and his betraying portrayer.

The parallel suggests Cafe Society is an older artist’s return to his imaginative past, especially to the romanticism and moral tensions of that 1979 classic. There are other echoes: the golden dusk skyline, the Manhattan-philiac score, the romantic carriage ride in Central Park. The December-June romance here is displaced onto Phil Stern’s relationship with his secretary Vonnie, though the nebbish (Isaac there, Bobby here) still finds himself caught unawares in a romantic triangle. The new film is less judgmental: there is no betrayal in the Phil-Vonnie-Bobby triangle, just a collision of genuine loves. (Phil’s wife suffers the betrayal Yale committed upon his wife and friend Isaac).

The back of the head is explicitly inexpressive. What can hair say in the dark? The climactic face shot may be played as inexpressive — as Rouben Mamoulian instructed Garbo to play her Queen Christina —  but it trusts the audience to read into it the complex of emotions the context provides. The back does that as well. 

We read into our rear view of Bobby’s head the elements we found in Vonnie’s face in the preceding scene: a detachment from the hilarity around them, a loving memory of each other and both a regret and a resignation that their choices turned them so dramatically apart. Of course the characters and the bicoastal settings are bridged by the song on the soundtrack, “I’ll Take Manhattan,” which Bobby did and which Vonnie might now prefer to have done. 

The soundtrack is studded with Rogers and Hart songs. The composers are cited here as having based their careers on the sadness of unrequited love. They “got it right.” Here as in Annie Hall art provides a satisfaction and completeness that real life doesn’t. 

The film itself seems a film about film. In the opening lines the Beverly Hills poolside life is described as a supersaturated Technicolor experience. Hence the burnished gold in which 1930’s Hollywood is imaged and in the glorious aura of the Hollywood stars, who are constantly named in the dialogue — without anyone appearing in the story (some do on film). Their names transcend corporeality. 

Allen’s third-person narration of the film confirms this detachment. We’re watching a narrative of supposed life but it’s packaged and presented as a story. Allen sounds like an 80-year-old man now, even as Jesse Eisenberg’s speech rhythms recall the young Woody. It’s an old man’s story, an old man’s retrospection, in which experience has softened the young man’s moral absolutism, softening our judgment of the romantic mistakes and even of the gangsters’ murderous criminality, whose victims may sometimes almost deserve their fate. 

As the erstwhile idealist Bobby points out, “In matters of the heart people do foolish things.” And sometimes they prove right — one way or another — as the later careers and maturity of Vonnie and Bobby appear to prove. As Vonnie explains, she had good reasons for preferring Phil. Arguably all three found fuller lives as a result. “Alternatives exclude”: We can’t  have everything. We make our choices as the heart and head determine and we live with the consequences. 

Here life doesn’t allow for rigid purity. Bobby’s early scene with the aspiring prostitute is a knot of impulses and conscientious restraints. The gangster murder scenes seem incongruous in a Woody Allen film but are absorbed into the period and film genre contexts of the plot. In Allen’s rewrite of Macbeth’s “tale told by an idiot,” life here is a comedy — written by a sadistic scriptwriter. 

In this land of romantic fiction, the Ali Baba Motel is at the intersection of Grace and Yucca. The sacred ever collides with the profane in the land of Hollywood gods and goddesses. In the most pragmatic choice gangster brother Ben converts to Catholicism on the eve of his execution because Jews don’t believe in an afterlife. Ben chooses to believe what the situation encourages him to believe.  And if Aristotle contended that the unexamined life is not worth living, “the examined life is no bargain either.” These are the ruminations of an older man. The old story teller's play with 1930s film conventions and genres prepares us for the suspension at the end: There is no happy ending, only choices, consequences and acceptance. As the Stern matriarch advises, “Live every day as if it’s the last and some day you’ll be right.”
      There's another implication of that closing back-head view. The character is leaving, walking away from us. Perhaps he's about to pursue his attraction to Vonny in Hollywood. Or perhaps he's turning his back finally on her and the lost alternative life she embodies. But by closing on the back rather than on the face Allen is deliberately obscuring his point, removing us and himself from the face.
     He may very well continue to make a film a year. Or this may prove his valedictory film, his final image. That may be him walking away from us. 

Essentially this film shows a master artist exulting in the practice of his art. It is masterfully made, rich in nuance and complexity. “The Lady is a Tramp” bridges Phil’s dumping of Vonnie and her developing love for Bobby. Vonnie is validated by the song’s respect for the irregularities and integrity of its heroine. When the two Exes meet in Bobby’s club later, her glib Hollywood chatter and his club-running slick are equally signs of their new lives, new experiences, but only overlays on their essential innocence when they first met and their bond and attraction that survives. 
Veronica asks Bobby if he was ever unfaithful to her. His pragmatic answer is no. But it may also be true, because a kiss is just a kiss, a treasured lost love is just a treasured lost love, as time and life and art go by. 

Love and Friendship

We don’t really have to wait for the novelization promised in the end credits for Lady Susan Vernon to be “thoroughly vindicated.” It’s in the film. 

Whit Stillman’s reading of Jane Austen’s novella anatomizes the constrictions the male-cantered social structure places on women and the manipulations and wiles women need to survive them. However dishonest, cunning, manipulative, cynical and both amoral and immoral she may be, Lady Susan does what she has to do to survive in an antipathetic social order. Her survival and her daughter’s marriage validate her schemes.

The narrative arc moves from the widow Lady Susan’s banishment from the Manwaring estate, where she has been seducing the master, to her daughter’s wedding. There Lady Susan is titularly married to a wealthy fool but is carrying Manwaring’s child. The plot is Lady Susan’s triumph despite a series of exposures and failed plans.   

There is a clear discrepancy between the genders’ power and worth in this battle of the sexes. Only Susan and Manwaring have any sexual spark; everyone else reads vapid. More importantly, Manwaring apart all the men are hapless tools, fools and gulls. The intelligence, sensitivity, awareness and the capacity to plan and to act rest solely in the women. 

Yet the men have all the power, all the authority. The women can effect their desires only by manipulating the foolish men. As a penniless widow with a young daughter Lady Susan can be forgiven her manipulations of the silly men who don’t deserve their authority and power. As Lady Susan observes, in this social order "Facts are such horrid things."

Susan’s sister-in-law Catherine is a positive contrast. She has Susan’s insight into male vanity and helplessness along with her ability to manipulate her husband. But she is direct and forthright about it. She deploys her cunning to protect her gullible brother and to preserve her family’s honour. Unlike Susan, though, Catherine can afford to be thus open because she is secure.

The three other women reflect their gender’s powerlessness. The American Alicia Johnson must sneak forbidden meetings with her close friend Susan under her husband’s threat of exile back to the dread Connecticut. Manwaring’s abandoned wife, despite her wealth and her protection by said Mr Johnson, is reduced to mad wailing by her humiliation. Susan reduces her supposed friend Mrs Cross to unpaid attendant until necessity finds her a job — until which she is at her “friend’s” mercy for sustenance. Susan’s assertiveness gains validation from these examples of women’s helplessness in a patriarchal society. 

The tension between a placid formal social surface and the tensions of gender warfare plays out in Manwaring’s name. As spelled, the name suggests the external face of manliness, the man that is worn whether for shelter, warmth or protection in a society biased against women. But the name is pronounced Mannering, as if the manners and social conventions are part of the patriarchal ordering that ensures the men’s advantage over women, however foolish and redundant the men — and needy and worthy the women. As the title suggests, both love and friendship are the arenas in which the social conventions oppress women — and where the outlaw widow must scheme to survive. Hence her "I had a feeling that the great word 'respectable' would some day divide us."

The young and handsome Reginald, for all his character and virtue, proves Susan’s most gullible prey. He is the film’s most articulate man, in contrast to the verbally silliest, Owen, whom Susan initially plots to marry her daughter then weds herself to cover for her pregnancy by Manwaring. 
    The other men speak in the short bursts of period foppery — except for Manwaring, who speaks not a word. As the sexual and motive force in the film, his wordless power contrasts to his partner Susan’s chatter and trickery and the other men’s vacuity. Manwaring’s expression is strictly in his stone face and steely eye. That he is Susan’s object and objective reminds us of the imbalance of power between the sexes. It is for his cold protection and hot embrace that Lady Susan so chillingly conducts herself. Not entirely to her discredit, when we gauge her need and the helplessness of the recessive women.   

Disorder

This tense roller-coaster of suspense encapsulates the current international corruption in politics. In the pre-title sequence two lines of charging, hooting soldiers converge on a tufted plain. The ensuing narrative will trace the central soldier’s disintegration — an emblem of the disintegration of our global politics. A broken time breaks its defenders — and requires broken men to save it.  

Hero Vincent is initially shot in intense close-up, which with the throbbing soundtrack suggests the wounded man’s heightened sensitivity. His visit to a crippled veterans’ rehab centre provides physical equivalents to his mental damage. There he buys blackmarket drugs, a dangerous alternative to the psychological help he refuses 

The political backdrop coheres with Vincent’s presentation as — from his tattoo — a figure of Chaos and the global disorder evoked by the title. The Lebanese mogul is an international arms dealer, himself a figure of chaos and political disorder, feeding the violence which ultimately creeps from the Middle East into his luxurious French estate. The posh party Vincent is hired to guard ripples with sinister disorder, from the belligerent unlisted visitor to the suspicious negotiations in the back rooms and rolling lawns. The ominous scheming undercuts the bucolic atmosphere of the estate’s name, Maryland.

Vincent’s eagerness to return to the war in Afghanistan shows him crippled not just by the violence of war but by his addiction to it. While friend Dennis explains that Vincent’s head is still in the battlefield, his anxiety makes him a questionable but effective “security guard.” The term is paradoxical for a man of such violence, paranoia and danger. When he appears to have over-reacted to the car possibly following Vincent and his charges to the seashore, his paranoia is justified by the violent attack upon them later. 

The arms-dealer’s family are a telling extension. Little Ali is the privileged son whose parents refrain from denying anything or disciplining him. The German Jessie begins as  the standard issue blonde trophy wife, but softens when she leaves the party to feed the dog. Though Vincent is initially hired to secure them for the arms dealer’s two days away, ultimately the arms-dealer abandons them, as the police will too. They are left to the shaky Vincent to protect. 

The polished serene Jessie and the damaged Vincent may seem antithetical but ultimately both prove isolated, enclosed in their respective psychological bubbles, unable to make any meaningful connection beyond themselves — except for the family dog, Ghost, an emblem of commitments now dead.

As Vincent grows increasingly enchanted by Jessie, he remains more removed and sombre than his friend Dennis’s later play with her. Vincent reads a romantic invitation into her fantasy of him killing bears in Canada. His delusion that they might have a relationship is harshly ended when he sees her look of fear and revulsion at his repeatedly smashing an invader’s face into the glass coffee table. The willfully uninformed Jessie is appalled at what her protection requires. 

Yet the last shot has Jessie returning to embrace Vincent. Whether she actually does that or he imagines her doing it we can’t firmly say. The film tacitly allows both readings. 

If she does it, she has realized her escape to Canada was impossible and she needs this powerful man to provide the security for which she initially married the arms dealer. If she doesn’t, then Vincent has taken another pathetic step into madness, bolstering his illegal painkillers with an implausible romantic fantasy. Either reading confirms the antithetical characters’ essential similarity as isolates awakened to a brutish disorder.  

     That theme grows out of writer/director Alice Winocour’s earlier Mustang, where three sisters leave their constrictive Innocence for Experience.  The woman’s hand is also evident in the film’s concern for how men are weakened by their strength. Her beefcake shots of Matthias Schoenaerts parody the familiar male fetishizing of the female lead.