 may well turn out to be the last film ever directed by Woody Allen.){kind=link}
Rifkin’s Festival (2020) may well turn out to be the last film ever directed by Woody Allen. After the controversies generated by claims of sexual abuse by his son Ronan Farrow, backed by Woody’s ex-partner Mia Farrow, he has been shunned by the film community like a leper. This is also reflected in the casting of Rifkin’s Festival. Unlike Allen’s other recent films which have been packed with stars, all working for scale just to be in a Woody Allen film, Rifkin’s Festival has no marquee stars in it. In his memoirs, Apropos of Nothing, Allen writes that in Rifkin’s Festival: “I found it hard to cast. One after the other, actors and actresses refused to work with me. Some I’m sure sincerely believed I was a predator. Clearly, a number of actors thought they were doing a noble thing rejecting offers to appear in my film. Their gesture might’ve been meaningful if indeed I were guilty of something, but since I was not, they were just persecuting an innocent man.”
Though Allen has not been tried or convicted, the Farrows claims have had far more weight and general acceptance than Allen’s denials. On the other hand, Roman Polanski, who has been tried and convicted of drugging and raping a 13 year old girl, and then fled justice, is freely making movies and actors of the caliber of Kate Winslet and Jodie Foster are happy to appear in his films (Kate Winslet has since expressed regret in appearing in both Polanski and Allen movies).
Perhaps knowingly, Allen has used Rifkin’s Festival to pay tribute to the films that he’s loved throughout his life and the film could be titled My Life in Movies by Woody Allen. The framework for the film has a writer called Mort Rifkin (Wallace Shawn) attending the San Sebastian International Film Festival with his wife Sue (Gina Gershon), who is a publicist for the new film by the hot young French director, Philippe (Louis Garrel). We then have a typical Allen scenario of Sue falling for Philippe while Rifkin becomes infatuated with a Spanish doctor Jo (Elena Anaya) who treats him for a minor injury, and is also married. Jo and Rifkin share the same taste in movies (i.e. Bergman, Fellini, Truffaut, Antonioni, Godard, Bunuel and even surprisingly Claude Lellouche). Here Allen, unlike films such as Annie Hall (1977) and Hollywood Ending (2002) where he poked fun at the Hollywood product, has a go at what Rifkin/Allen sees as pretentious “art movies”. When Jo professes that she found Philippe’s film pretentious, Rifkin couldn’t agree more.
This is the fifth time that Wallace Shawn has appeared in a Woody Allen film, a collaboration that goes back to Manhattan in 1979. Rifkin’s Festival though is the first time that he has the lead “Woody Allen” role. Listening to Rifkin’s dialogue, one can easily imagine Allen in that role and perhaps the film would have felt even more personal, had he done so. Perhaps Allen felt that at 84, he was too old to be romancing a forty something attractive Spanish doctor and opted for the slightly younger, 76 year old Wallace Shawn. The acting by the whole ensemble is very good and one does not feel the absence of the stars, though it will certainly hurt the box office takings of a film already hurt by controversy and very limited distribution, both due to Allen’s films having difficulty in finding exhibitors in USA and the added affliction of the Corona pandemic.
Though in terms of character study, story construction and dialogue, Rifkin’s Festival never rises to the levels of Allen’s best movies, what makes this film fun, and specially endearing to cinephiles, is Allen’s loving recreation of scenes, in black and white, of some of his favourite films, including Fellini’s 8½ (1963), Wells’s Citizen Kane (1941), Truffaut’s Jules and Jim (1962), Godard’s Breathless (1960), Bunuel’s The Exterminating Angel (1962), Lellouche’s A Man and A Woman (1966) and Bergman’s The Silence (1963) and The Seventh Seal (1957 – with Christoph Waltz playing the Angel of Death). Though in his previous films Allen has paid homage to these directors and films, either in a comic way such as to Bergman in Love and Death (1975), or created dramatic scenes influenced by them, for example to Fellini in Stardust Memories (1980), this is the first time that Allen references his favourite films and directors so overtly and goes as far as recreating scenes from their films.
Allen has made excellent use of the San Sebastian location. Having attended that festival as recently as 2019, I was familiar with all the locations and for me the film had an extra level of enjoyment as it rekindled my happy memories of that festival and its beautiful host city. As usual, Allen has employed a world class cinematographer to enhance the visual element of the film, Rifkin’s festival being his fourth collaboration with Vittorio Storaro.
So, what’s next for Woody Allen? In Apropos of Nothing he confesses, “I like making movies, but if I never made another one it would not bother me. I’m happy to write plays. If no one would produce them, I’m happy to write books. If no one would publish them, I’m happy to write for myself, confident that if the writing is good, it will someday be discovered and read by people, and if it is bad writing, better no one sees it. Whatever happens to my work when I’m gone is totally irrelevant to me.”
In a year where dearth of good new movies has been plainly evident, Rifkin’s Festival at least provides a rare pleasure, specially for cinephiles and could be a fitting swan song for Woody Allen, encapsulating his love of the medium and the directors and films that influenced him.
© 2021. UniversalCinema Mag.