Rifkin’s Festival — Woody Allen’s J’accuse

Woody Allen’s Rifkin’s Festival is a comic retrospective about a film professor (played by Wallace Shawn) who, in his pathetic senior years, sees his life in terms of old films — flashbacks and fantasies that parody the classic canon. Rifkin the snob attends the San Sebastian Film Festival in Spain, where prize-giving is a highbrow affair, as is sniping at other people’s pretenses — and humoring his own peccadilloes. Yet Rifkin’s attempt at sexual renewal with a younger woman (Elena Anaya) while his wife (Gina Gershon), a social-climbing film publicist, chases after a randy French film director (Louis Garrel) is not very funny. It all feels exhausted because it is false. Instead of another routine foray into casual adultery as a metric of modern morality, this should have been a scabrous satire on cinema’s decline and hypocrisy’s ascendance.

But Allen lost his nerve — or maybe just lost direction. Having conceived Rifkin’s Festival after Philip Roth’s 1995 novel Sabbath’s Theater (about an aged puppeteer and reprobate named Mickey Sabbath who impishly undermines the pretenses of everyone he meets), Allen goes soft on his obvious enemies. The unoriginal plotting seems stymied. It lacks the vengeful motivation of Allen’s last good movie, Deconstructing Harry (1999). Rifkin’s story should rage against the pusillanimous like Roth and the hero of Look Back in Anger.

Rifkin’s Festival could have been Allen’s payback and his j’accuse. We can’t ignore the career difficulties Allen has experienced since allegations of sexual impropriety have brought out the disloyalty of former colleagues. That’s a genuine Millennial phenomenon. (Roth’s novel seems a model for both Deconstructing Harry and Charlie Kaufman’s Being John Malkovich, the latter a satire on narcissism that proved prescient about our millennium.) The U.S. boycott of Allen’s last film and his published autobiography makes one expect a summing-up in which Allen would disgorge his understandable bile and real antagonism, in a style that would clear the fetid air — the miasma in which people pretend that The Power of the Dog, Don’t Look Up, and Drive My Car are revelatory motion pictures.

The disappointment of Rifkin’s Festival starts with Allen’s inability to deal with the cultural tragedy of the #MeToo vengeance that ruined his career. The hackneyed premise about a film-nerd cuckold in need of psychoanalysis distracts from the real-life dilemma of personal betrayal. Onscreen appearances by stalwarts Shawn (Allen’s homunculus in Manhattan and now his alter ego) and Doug McGrath (co-screenwriter of Bullets Over Broadway) are encouraging, yet Allen’s support team doesn’t address what these savvy New Yorkers must know about how sex, careerism, politics, industry mendacity, and judgmental vengeance intertwine, thus vilifying Allen and reducing film culture to the moral distractions that define these times. (McGrath’s quip about a “millstone” needs a clear target.)

Didn’t Allen learn anything about fidelity, faith, and existentialism from the great European films parodied in Rifkin’s Festival? Or is his point that all that culture was for naught, just as he used to say that life was meaningless? Shawn’s Rifkin is not part of the movie industry, but his parasitic relationship to film culture is pompous and condescending. His spoofs on Fellini, Bergman, Truffaut, Godard, Buñuel, and Welles — giants of the heroic age of filmmaking — are shabbier than Wes Anderson’s failed homages in The French Dispatch. It won’t do for Rifkin to sneer “Chekhov didn’t settle, Stendhal didn’t settle, Stravinsky didn’t settle” when Allen can’t even do acceptable eyeline-match edits and the Breathless skit is unforgivably inept. (Belmondo and Seberg were romantic, but Garrel and Gershon are lewd.)

Rifkin’s Festival should have been Allen’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, a work about a period in movie culture when a tragic development reveals a filmmaker’s fascination and melancholy. Tarantino got the violence of period TV shows wrong (confusing it with his own style of mayhem), and Allen mangles the morality of the European masters, confusing their profundity with his own trite moral chaos. (But will Millennials know the difference?) This may not be Allen’s fault entirely. His downfall may have begun with his celebration as a cultural icon, led by the New York Times, a status that was widely accepted and unchallenged. Allen wasn’t the new cinema master, equal to Chaplin and Bergman, that the Times claimed, and Rifkin’s Festival proves that he doesn’t possess the film-buff, idiot-savant qualities that marks Tarantino’s distinctive talent. Rifkin’s crisis recalls the Danny DeVito scenes in Todd Solondz’s Wiener-Dog, in which DeVito plays a film professor talking to a generation that no longer relates to film art. His agony could also be summed up by Rifkin’s query: “Do you have anything to say after all that I’ve told you?”

Vittorio Storaro photographs Rifkin’s Festival like a rainbow — all clear skies and glowing colors as if he was inspired by Bertolucci’s vision. But I’d prefer that Allen had Tarantino’s gift for responding to cultural history with screwball moral vengeance. Instead, Rifkin’s Festival fails to answer either the social calamity that Allen suffers or the demise of cinema culture that we cannot deny. It is a missed opportunity.