Woody Allen’s ‘Rifkin’s Festival’ Revisits Familiar Ground

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Woody Allen’s Rifkin’s Festival begins promisingly, loses momentum and comes to a surprisingly satisfactory conclusion. Wallace Shawn stars as Mort Rifkin, the sort of character etched into Allen’s repertoire. He’s neurotic and in therapy, an intellectual (film historian) who wants to be an artist but makes no progress on his novel for fear of failing as a novelist. Married to the much younger and more attractive Sue (Gina Gershon), a press agent, he tags along with her to a film festival in San Sebastian, Spain.

“Film festivals are no longer what they were,” Mort laments. “I taught cinema as art—the great European masters.” Alas, today’s young rebels are at best shallow imitators, pale reflections of a brilliant past. Chief among them, Sue’s client Philippe (Louis Garrel), a glib artist who possesses all the things Mort lacks, especially sexual magnetism leavened with romance and a dash of adventure. Mort suspects Sue is having an affair with Philippe. He may be neurotic but he has reasons for his suspicions.

Through the early scenes, Allen swipes at the marketplace hustle, the phony artistry, found at many contemporary film festivals. Mort overhears a producer casting a picture about the Eichmann trial with a blond runway model a Hannah Arendt. The press heap praise on political message-mongers, mistaking pamphleteering for profundity. The world has shifted uncomfortably. Pathos follows Mort as he pads around San Sebastian, looking ahead to a road much shorter than the one behind him.

Several funny lines and gags aside, much of the humor falls flat. Allen’s well of comedic inspiration is dry this season—or is it partly Shawn’s shortcoming. He wears bemusement and bafflement through much of the film and looks woefully out of sorts trying to chat up the beautiful physician he visits with chest pains (Elena Anaya). He wants to see her again, hoping that his blood test indicates trouble. That would have been funny coming from Allen 40 years ago.

Like many Allen films, Rifkin’s Festival is an ongoing conversation between smart people talking about smart things. Their heads mix with their heart and affection sizzles with lust, forming unstable chemical compounds. As always, Allen’s love of great cinema is pervasive, illustrated here by dream and fantasy sequences casting Mort and his companions into black and white recreations of his favorite films. First, in a boyhood memory of Depression-era New York, Mort throws snowballs outside the window as his parents kvetch (Citizen Kane). At the climax, Mort plays chess with Death (The Seventh Seal) and heeds the hooded figure’s counsel: Life may be meaningless but it doesn’t have to be empty: we can fill it with our actions.

That Existentialism has been Allen’s perennial philosophy. Audiences have heard and seen everything in Rifkin’s Festival before, except perhaps the lengthening shadow of the hour hand as it passes 11. Allen’s films have long been concerned with death. With Rifkin’s Festival it no longer seems like a distant abstraction.

Opens Jan. 28 at the Downer Theater.