Rifkin's Festival (Woody Allen, 2020) (Patreon)

First things first. I'd kind of sworn off Woody Allen, for the obvious reasons. Even if we don't know precisely whether he is guilty, I felt that it was the judicious thing to refrain from supporting his creative endeavors. And in truth, I didn't think I'd be missing much. But the entire premise of Rifkin's Festival was simply too perverse to ignore, and through the Magic of the Internet, I was able to watch it without providing its maker any remuneration. 

To be honest, I was expecting to hate Rifkin's Festival. From what I'd read, it appeared to be a match made in hell: a filmmaker who'd long since lapsed into delusional wish fulfillment and self-aggrandizement, signing up to reward a film festival's support with a kind of cinematic promotional brochure. And there is quite a bit of that. The San Sebastian IFF's scenic environs are prominently featured, as is the SSIFF logo. Characters randomly comment on how beautiful San Sebastian is, and what a lovely time they're having at the festival. It really does get to be like spending 90 minutes watching the hotel information channel.

I didn't hate it, though. I actually came away feeling pretty ambivalent, and a little sad. Even when he's on autopilot, and clearly embittered about a film community that's largely abandoned him, Woody is still a strikingly good filmmaker. The script is trash (e.g., cheap shots at film criticism, Allen still lionizing the same five filmmakers who defined his youth). This is the sort of material Woody can (and probably did) knock off in a couple of hours. But his work with Storaro remains crystalline, alternating between sturdy but unassuming two- and three-shots and more dramatic organizations of figures in the landscape. (There are shots in Rifkin's Festival that reminded me of Manoel de Oliveira, actually.)

What's more, amidst the patent stupidity -- Mort Rifkin (Wallace Shawn), a cranky old New York intellectual, competes with a shallow French hipster director (Louis Garrel) for the affections of the somewhat younger Mrs. Rifkin, Sue (Gina Gershon), while whining his way into the life of a local doctor (Elena Anaya) -- and Allen's exhausted bromides about Art and Culture and the Great European Achievements, there's actually some poignancy. This comes courtesy of Shawn, who wisely refrains from doing a Woody impersonation and delivers his lines as if they were made of stone. They fall ruefully from his mouth, as if he and he alone recognizes that Woody Allen long ago came to exemplify the middlebrow pedantry he's so keen to lampoon. 

And who knows? Maybe Allen knows this too. There's a strange, unexpected callback to the Annie Hall joke where Marshall McLuhan pops into the frame to castigate a blowhard. Still, if Allen has gone to a film festival to make a film about how film festivals don't support his art anymore, and in the process reveals that even he knows his films are not just unfashionable but irrelevant . . . well, that's all a bit too Moebius and solipsistic to even ponder.