Direction: Woody Allen
Country: USA / Spain / Italy
Wallace Shawn, who stunned in Louis Malle’s 1981 masterpiece My Dinner With Andre, stars in Woody Allen’s Rifkin’s Festival, a comedy where there are incantations and personal supplications to be found. By comparison with Allen's recent work, I must admit this one presents something more to pull it slightly above the average. But that doesn't mean it's free of clichéd situations.
The story is set in the Spanish city of San Sebastian during its film festival, and follows Mort Rifkin (Shawn in his sixth collaboration with Allen), a failed writer and pleased film teacher who is ignored by his wife, Sue (Gina Gershon), as she obsesses with a pretentious, narcissistic French filmmaker (Louis Garrel). The lonely Mort is assaulted by weird dreams, a wide range of anxieties and imaginary conversations with family and people from his past. His inner fears take the expression of uncomfortable chest pains that, all of a sudden, go away after he sees Doctor Jo Rojas (Elena Anaya).
Allen paints both dreams and flashbacks in black-and-white as well as some fragmented recreations of European classics - his homage to Bergman, Godard, Truffaut, Fellini, and Buñuel - which are artfully wrung into the plot. There can be little doubt that certain plot points don’t add up to a story that is very much Allen’s. Yet, he sort of gets away with this melting pot of contemporary and classic cinema that plays as inoffensive as warm-hearted.
