A common complaint about Woody Allen’s films ever since they moved from overt comedy to more cerebral fare is that the dialogue didn’t change accordingly. It still had that stilted, artificial quality that sounded more appropriate coming off a stage during a standup routine, but wasn’t necessarily supposed to be funny. Because of Allen’s prodigious output over the years, most of us became used to this style and adjusted as long as the characters and stories made sense, but the director’s most recent work has mostly been a reshuffling of already covered themes and the dialogue problem has thus become more pronounced. Though there are certainly extraneous reasons why his latest English-language comedy (I’ve heard he’s finished a more recent French language film) has failed to enjoy the kind of wide distribution he used to take for granted, the neglect may simply be due to the fact that the movie itself feels so inconsequential: Another Woody Allen movie that in a year or so no one will be able to distinguish from dozens of other movies he’s made.

Allen’s avatar here is Mort Rifkin, who, as played by Wallace Shawn, only makes the stereotypical Woodyisms that much less tolerable. Though Shawn can be amusing and even affecting within his own acting wheelhouse, he seems to have been shoehorned into the role of a retired film studies professor who accompanies his younger wife, Sue (Gina Gershon), to San Sebastian for the film festival, where she has a job as a publicist for a hot young French director played by Louis Garrell. Though Shawn is 8 years younger than Allen, it feels as if the director decided that if he went with a stand-in with his own distinctive screen persona he could make viewers forget about the various disparities incumbent in the film’s main connubial dynamic, but it isn’t possible, especially given Shawn’s patented schlubby screen appeal contrasted with Gershon’s well-seasoned sexual panache. The pair’s scenes together, compounded by the aforementioned stilted dialogue, are almost unwatchable since these differences aren’t alluded to at all. When Sue predictably starts sleeping with her client, Mort reacts not as someone who, by dint of his age and appearance, should have seen something like this coming, but as someone who blames it all on the over-familiarity bred of a long relationship, which makes little sense in this context. But it does provide the justification for Mort, after experiencing some slight chest discomfort, to seek out the services of a young female cardiologist (Elena Anaya) whose intellectual interests make more of an impression on him than her physical attributes. Not that Mort thinks he’s going to get to first base with her, a development that might have provided some queasy but actionable comic potential. Instead, Rifkin’s Festival is just another story about an older man’s need to have his worth acknowledged as a man.

Even Allen’s penchant for skewering intellectual pretentiousness falls flat. Whatever pushback Mort gets at the festival for his doctrinnaire approach to the old European cinema masters feels tired and trite. At least Garrell, playing a new shining light who endeavors to inject more Hollywood glitz into his art, provides some self-conscious rakishness; and Christoph Waltz’s cameo as a chess-playing foil pulls off the kind of non sequitur joke that Allen used to be so good at. Though I almost hate to say it, what Rifkin’s Festival really needs is Woody Allen the comic actor, but at 88 he’s obviously past all that now. He’s just running on whatever fumes fuel his old typewriter.

In English and Spanish. Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011).

Rifkin’s Festival home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2020 Mediaproduccion S.L.U., Gravier Productions, Inc. & Wildside S.r.L.