RIFKIN'S FESTIVAL (2020) ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Woody Allen
Wallace Shawn, Gina Gershon, Elena Anaya,
Louis Garrel, Douglas McGrath, Steve Guttenberg,
Sergi Lopez, Tammy Blanchard, Christoph Waltz
This is not the worst late-career Woody Allen movie to come along, which is faint praise maybe, but there it is. Wallace Shawn plays a film critic and would-be novelist, tagging along with his wife (Gina Gershon), who's working publicity at the San Sebastian Film Festival. While she spends most of her time with a hot young director (Louis Garrel), he starts to fall for an attractive doctor (Elena Anaya), so here's yet another Woody Allen movie dealing with love, infatuation and infidelity among people who are too smart for their own good. (At least this time, one of the protagonists is not a 20-year-old girl.) The best parts are the dream sequences. (Shawn's character always dreams scenes from classic movies, in black and white.) Welles, Truffaut, Bergman, Fellini, Godard and Bunuel are all represented, so there's at least a faint echo of "Stardust Memories going on, and if you stay till the end, you get a riff on "The Seventh Seal" with Christoph Waltz as Death.
