In Sunset Boulevard, semi-professional screenwriter Joe Gillis (William Holden) gives one of many memorable voiceovers in the form of, “Sometimes it’s interesting to see just how bad bad writing can be.” In the case of Woody Allen’s “screenplay” for Rifkin’s Festival, there’s nothing “interesting” about it, so much as extremely horrifying. Not only the fact that Allen has actually managed to get worse instead of better after so much “practice” (most of which, granted, has been the same recycled jokes, themes and character archetypes), but that he genuinely seems to believe his movies are still dealing with the “hard” questions, namely those pertaining to existentialism.
Of course, anyone who has seen even a few Allen movies, whether from his newer or older oeuvre, can apprehend that his tendency is to engage heavily with the practice of dime store philosophy (and psychology, to boot). With regard to this crutch, Allen’s long-standing insecurity about not completing a college education is something that clearly plays into this obsession with parading an “intellectual” constantly calling everyone else a pseudo-intellectual while himself knowing that’s precisely what he is. Ah, projection.
Mort Rifkin (a hopelessly gross Wallace Shawn) is yet another addition to this increasingly indistinguishable-from-one-another character canon. Except that rather than even bothering this time with such notions of “fleshing out” his protagonist, it’s never been more apparent that Allen simply had a few “witty” lines lying around that he couldn’t think of anything better to do with than slap into a “screenplay” in the form of “dialogue.” The only problem being that dialogue usually infers, at the bare minimum, an A and B conversation as opposed to an old white male verbally masturbating onto whoever happens to be nearby. Commonly, as is the Allen way, that “whoever” is a much younger (generally and in respect to his own age) woman.
This includes Mort’s wife, Sue (Gina Gershon), the publicist working on promoting a new film at the festival in San Sebastian for a French director named Philippe (Louis Garrel). Philippe plays into that other quintessential Allen insecurity about being hopelessly inferior aesthetically to any male competition. This has manifested countless times in previous movies of his, including Annie Hall, Manhattan and Anything Else. And yes, the same goes for Mort’s low (yet simultaneously high) self-esteem in Rifkin’s Festival, with Sue being blatantly enamored of Philippe. The “overt attraction” (replete with the kind of bad dialogue that makes Danielle Steele come across as Shakespearean) between the two, of course, gives Mort even more fuel to make fun of Philippe and his faux pretentiousness (another classic case of Allen’s proverbial character mouthpiece calling the kettle black).
Thus, Mort’s open mockery of Philippe’s new movie, called Apocalyptic Nights. He barbs, “Yes, ‘war is hell,’ as far as insights go,” elsewhere belittling Philippe for believing his next project can bring peace between Israel and Palestine. None of these callouts regarding Philippe’s phoniness can faze Sue, who grows more and more unavailable as the festival (therefore the movie) drags on, and remains seemingly unconcerned in any way whatsoever about Mort catching her in her lies. And so, in between being placated with conciliatory gestures like tickets to a screening of Breathless (which, disjointed as it is and annoying as Jean Seberg’s American accent speaking French is, still has a more watchable “plot”), Mort himself is permitted the opportunity to surrender fully to his movie-oriented fantasies.
Strangely (and perhaps mercifully for the sake of not ruining the movie), Allen makes no allusion to any films of Billy Wilder, despite Joe Gillis having his number with the aforementioned bad writing comment. Yes, Wilder gets out of Allen’s “cinematic” jail for free, while other “masters” do not manage to escape so easily. As Allen has made plain many times before, Fellini and Bergman are his great influences. Or rather, the auteurs from the white male pantheon he wishes he could most successfully emulate as opposed to constantly referencing them verbally and, here, re-creating specific scenes of theirs (as well as other groundbreaking directors like Welles and Truffaut) to offer something like “insight” (as opposed to a botched attempt at a Stardust Memories redux) into Mort’s neurosis. A neurosis that makes no effort to hide its patent privilege as he provides “commentary” on how political problems are “ephemeral” and “don’t matter.” Sure they don’t—when you’re a rich blanco that’s been living in an Upper East Side bubble for decades.
And, talking of that New York neighborhood, Allen is sure to frequently incorporate his overall love for his hometown into the “dialogue,” for Jo (Elena Anaya) just so happens to have gone to NYU before deciding to return to Spain and practice medicine there. It’s almost as though Allen is openly telling us he can’t stand to keep playing at this charade of giving a shit about other cities in Europe except for Paris, which Mort splooges over at random on several non sequitur occasions throughout Rifkin’s Festival. And yet, Europe is one of the few places that will still embrace what he’s “doing,” which, at this point is clear to no one, least of all Allen.
If anything, he’s simply trying to single-handedly keep the May-December romance trope alive, without at least also using the cliché of a man’s wealth (as opposed to “intellectual prowess”) to explain the discrepancy between his “look” and the object of his desire’s. It’s because of both this “style” of filmmaking and the molestation charges of his adopted daughter, Dylan Farrow, that have made getting financing from America, let alone NYC, all but impossible after his cancellation. Plus what American actresses after Elle Fanning and Selena Gomez (ostensibly fond of old men as her latest, Only Murders in the Building, indicates) in A Rainy Day in New York—amazingly, more watchable than Rifkin’s Festival—would agree to star in something so offending on all levels? Enter the character of Jo Rojas, played by Anaya, a sort of poor man’s Penelope Cruz (because, obviously, gone are Allen’s more credible mid-00s days of Vicky Cristina Barcelona).
As the cardiologist recommended to Mort by one of Sue’s colleagues at the festival—because, yes, all of Allen’s main characters must be hypochondriacs—he is extremely jarred by discovering that she is, sacre bleu, a woman. For he is, without any awareness of it (just like Allen), the type of retro guy who would put “female doctor” in quotes. The type of man who doesn’t compute that women can have “men’s names” as well, and that not everything fits neatly into his prime boomer-era box.
“Fortunately,” he’s put at ease quite quickly when he realizes, after his “shock,” how attractive she is. Because why should his age or perpetually gross and disgusting wet lips randomly asking her questions about Central Park be seen by him as any kind of obstacle preventing him from “getting” the girl? Possibly because this is the “Woody Allen universe,” where younger, “damaged” women swoon over Allen’s character doppelganger.
For Allen’s “coup de grâce” in this movie, he waits until the very end to pull Christoph Waltz out of hiding (likely rightfully embarrassed for being part of this amateurish project, yet perhaps willing to do so because the part was so small). He plays Death in a sendup of the film Allen has repeatedly cited as the one that essentially “raised” him: The Seventh Seal. But there is no Bergman understatedness or eloquence to be had here, just Waltz telling Rifkin that, yeah, life is shit and you need to find what numbs you to that reality best. For Rifkin, ultimately, it’s going back to teaching his classic movie courses instead of trying to write a great literary masterpiece (again, douche bag city up in this bitch). Would that Allen himself had decided to teach (since he clearly can’t do anymore) instead of continuing to make movies this past decade in particular. Ah, but then, no female student would be safe.
Ironically, Mort is meant to be a character who has nothing but reverence for film. And yet, Rifkin’s Festival has to be among one of the greatest atrocities rendered to the screen not only in recent memory, but quite possibly since the dawn of this century. Nonetheless, for whatever reason, critics are still politely suggesting such things as, “Rifkin’s numerous runs for the doctor’s office and the zipless romance that follows help to make this Allen’s finest and funniest since Midnight in Paris.”
Uh no. While Rifkin’s Festival bears the same plot device as Midnight in Paris with regard to its lead character finding that another woman simply better “understands” his “joie de vivre” than the one he’s actually with, it can hardly be dubbed a “zipless romance.” This, for starters, assumes it’s acceptable for Wallace Shawn to be acting like he’s sexually desirable to a woman with intact faculties. What’s more, Midnight in Paris is overrated schlock (among Allen’s most overrated, to be sure) that’s predicated on the fallacy of wistfulness for a different time before we were actually living in the worst time ever. But even so, at least there were occasional threads of cohesion in between letting the backdrops of Paris do all the work for Allen. It’s clear in Rifkin’s Festival, however, that Allen doesn’t seem as “taken” with the landscape, frequently having Mort instead “wax poetic” about Paris as his dream place to escape to.
So no, there is nothing within these frames that warrants adjectives like “finest” or funniest” when we’re talking about seeing another constantly complaining adult baby created by Allen as a “foil” for himself so that he can proceed to whine and moan about the meaning of existence. As though that in and of itself should be viewed as “enough” to get a stamp of approval on the film that reads, in giant capital red letters, “PROFOUND.” It’s not. And, if this ends up being Allen’s last film, well, it might be a humiliating coda for his filmography, but better for everyone else involved.
