Review | Rifkin’s Festival movie review: Woody Allen at his most lacklustre and derivative in Spain-set feature
- It wouldn’t be a Woody Allen film without a character who’s a surrogate for the director. Wallace Shawn plays Mort Rifkin but is really not up to the task
- The observations about life the 85-year-old Allen has his characters regurgitate throughout feel tired. If this is the best he has to offer, he should retire
1/5 stars
As Woody Allen continues to court controversy in his personal life, professionally the 85-year-old writer-director is as prolific as ever. Rifkin’s Festival is his 48th feature film, and revisits a number of his favourite themes, including classical European cinema, illicit romances, and his disdain for the film industry’s commercialisation. But it also finds the director at his most lacklustre and derivative.
In early 2019, Amazon Studios dropped Allen from a five-picture deal, following sexual abuse allegations filed by his adopted daughter, forcing him to seek financing for his work further afield. The result is a modest European co-production, set and filmed entirely on location at the San Sebastian Film Festival in northern Spain.
Gone are the days when Hollywood’s A list would rally to Allen’s casting call, falling over themselves to slash their fees for the opportunity to appear in one of the four-time Oscar winner’s coveted ensembles. Rifkin’s Festival can muster only the talents of Wallace Shawn, Gina Gershon, Louis Garrel and Elena Anaya, who are tasked with regurgitating Allen’s increasingly tired observations.
Shawn follows in the footsteps of John Cusack, Kenneth Branagh and Larry David as Allen’s on-screen surrogate. His Mort Rifkin is a self-confessed “middle-aged Jew from the Bronx”, a retired film lecturer now wrestling with an unfinished novel, who accompanies his wife Sue (Gershon), a successful publicist, on a work trip to San Sebastian.
Mort can barely contain his contempt for Sue’s client (Garrel), a French filmmaker whose latest offering is the toast of the festival. He suspects they are having an affair, and soon begins his own lustful pursuit of a beautiful Spanish doctor (Anaya).
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The film’s best moments are a series of daydreams, in which Mort’s fantasies come to life in the style of cinematic masters such as Welles, Godard, Fellini and Bergman. They display Allen’s keen understanding of these auteurs’ unique sensibilities, but he has performed this trick before, and these vignettes serve little narrative purpose other than to illustrate Mort’s own artistic snobbery.
Throughout, Rifkin’s Festival feels repetitive and underdeveloped, while recalling many of Allen’s earlier, more accomplished works, and Shawn is woefully ill-equipped for the task at hand.
For many audiences, Allen may no longer be a filmmaker who holds any interest. If Rifkin’s Festival is emblematic of what he is able still to deliver, perhaps it is finally time to draw a line under his once-great career, and like Mort, content ourselves with the established classics of yesteryear.
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