Made in 2019, this is Woody Allen’s 50th feature in 53 years. That deserves an !. (Btw, Hitchcock made his 50th — Torn Curtain — in 41 years, at 67.) Moreover, this is a rich, thoughtful, moving and amusing film that — as usual for Allen — manages to draw freshness out of familiar style and material. Of course, the reworking of the personal familiar defines an auteur. Familiarity should not breed the contempt of the lazy reviewer.
As the title suggests, Allen here examines one man’s personal relationship with that most public medium, film, and its culture. Specifically, an aging man — though not yet nearing Allen’s 86th year — is inevitably out of step with the contemporary world and its cinema.
Allen’s films have always exercised the medium’s self-referentiality. Indeed he learned his craft by making parodies, from What’s Up Tiger Lily (1966) through Love and Death (1975). Thereafter his characters have always existed in a cinema culture. Annie Hall (1977) stretched the conventions of film narrative by breaking the fourth wall. Bergman inspired Interiors (1978) and A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982). In between, Stardust Memories (1980) danced between the vision and style of Antonioni and Fellini.
Here Wallace Shawn seems an inevitable choice for an Allen surrogate. A short but plumper nebbish than the Allen persona, in fact he played the wild animal (aka “homunculus”) who preceded lover Isaac in Manhattan. As his character here is named Mort, Rifkin’s failed love story carries a whiff of death. When Rifkin declares his firm aversion to death — whether from illness, old age or a choked bagel —he’s also rejecting the human condition, himself.
The characters lack of appeal and charm shows the aging Woody’s bemused sense of his current self. Allen again works in the explanation he gave for his controversial (and long-standing) marriage: “Since when did relationships become rational? The heart will have its way.”
Rifkin is an ex-film prof now struggling to write a masterpiece novel. Like Allen, his concern for life’s “terrifying questions” beyond politics and genre exercises detach him from contemporary cinema. But his touchstone classics are of no interest or effect in the current climate. The festival may honour Godard and Bunuel but the films are purely commercial. His idea that cinema is an art is itself archaic. As his dream father advises, today “Money talks; shit walks.”
The film’s opening and closing scenes start with a high angle shot down on Rifkin at a therapy session. This “God’s eye view” may imply a religious world view — or a bird. At the end, after hearing the report we’ve seen, if the therapist has a response to Rifkin’s story Allen doesn’t stay to hear it.
Rifkin accompanied his press agent wife Sue to the San Sebastian Film Festival because he fears losing her to a client, the hot young French director, Philippe. He is riding the crest of his new film, Apocalyptic Dreams. His next feature is modestly intended to solve the Palestinian-Israeli problem.
The song behind Allen’s opening titles establishes the wider cinematic oneirics: “Just wrap your troubles in dreams and dream all your troubles away.” As Sue remarks, “Films are like celluloid dreams.” Not yet for her the seducer’s apocalyptic. Thus Rifkin finds refuge in living/dreaming parodies of certain classics, in the unfashionable purity of black and white: Citizen Kane, 8 1/2, Jules and Jim, A Man and a Woman (which alone here was largely in colour), Breathless, Persona, Wild Strawberries, The Exterminating Angel and finally The Seventh Seal.
Having profoundly absorbed these classics he now injects himself into them. His dreams of them enable him to live in the films and escape the marital loss looming in idyllic San Sebastian, even beyond the festival. Indeed the films teach him about his life but now in their parodic form. As an art, film finds its meaning and effect in its interchange with its viewer.
The films connect to each other, as if representing a parallel reality. Kane’s Rose Budnick leads into The Seventh Seal. Rifkin’s love for Doris arises in the Breathless fantasy and is answered in Wild Strawberries. Rifkin lives the film’s title when he says “Why are we under the sheets? I’m suffocating.” The romance of Lelouch’s driving scene is undercut by the flat tire.
The main references are to Bergman. From the revisioned Wild Strawberries he realizes that his beautiful young wife Sue “fell in love with his mind” but could never stay satisfied with “a cranky little introvert who’s searching for an answer to whether there’s something rather than nothing.” Finally, from The Seventh Seal’s famous chess scene Death teaches Rifkin that just because life is meaningless doesn’t mean it has to be empty. Allen’s Death concludes with sensible health advice, for a longer life. Art helps too.
As Alvy taught us, films provide a happy ending that life denies. Rifkin finds solace and affirmation in the classic-film-loving beautiful Dr. Joanna Rojas. He is encouraged by her penchant for marrying assholes. Even if she does not fly off with him, she has renewed his hopes for life, even for a post-marital romantic life, and reintroduced him to pleasure, to the fullness possible in meaningless life. He’s encouraged to abandon his literary fantasy and to return to his strength, teaching classic film.
There may not be life after death but there can be love after marriage. And small pockets of serious cinema even in the predominant wasteland. Woody Allen remains a blessing.
