For his 50th (!) Feature film Woody Allen has chosen to set the story during the days in which an important European film festival takes place, that of San Sebastian, in Spain, transforming the suspended dimension between reality and fiction that one breathes on these occasions into a metaphor for life. The theme has always been central to the cinema of the New York director, who this time he finds his alter ego in the pedantic film professor Mort Rifkin (who has the fat and clumsy vitality of Wallace Shawn), left in the wake of his wife Sue, press office of an important and unbearable young director, Philippe, to whom she is attracted. Pushed aside by the other two, Mort (nomen omen?) Will be infatuated with the charming Jo Rojas.
Mort is the custodian of a romantic gaze that transfigures reality and one’s life – both in the present and in memories – through the masterpieces of the great masters of modern cinema (“Otto e mezzo” by Fellini, “Jules et Jim” by Truffaut, ” Until the last breath ”by Godard,“ The exterminating angel ”by Buñuel,“ The place of strawberries ”,“ Person ”and“ The Seventh Seal ”by the beloved Bergman). The cinema of the past, as a solipsistic escape and as a construction of a symbolic imaginary, is the space in which the small, graceless and naive Mort, like many of Woody Allen’s characters / alter ego, seeks shelter from the chaotic and overwhelming grandeur of the world. . Unlike many previous films, in “Rifkin’s Festival” this escape remains largely unsolved and leads only to a precarious and problematic acceptance of the opportunities of the present. It should be enough? It is not known, because in the end Mort reflects on himself, but with a look that slips silently from nostalgia to melancholy, in a sense of the end that jokes can no longer really exorcise.
Only the great mystery of death remains unsolved, which can be postponed once again (as in the cameo scene of Christoph Waltz who plays it, as in “The seventh seal”), but isn’t it still a dream hallucination? This void, which for Mort is above all that of all missed opportunities, is rendered plastically by the light and color that Vittorio Storare paints, especially in the interiors. The famous cinematographer enhances the contrast between warm and cold colors (especially blue), making them coexist in the same image, just as he did in “The Wheel of Wonders”. In fact, Mort and Ginny have several aspects in common: they are, in spite of themselves, witnesses of the importance of preserving a dream dimension of existence, one in which dreams can still be realized. Could this awareness be the true condemnation of living?
Direction: Woody Allen; Interpreters: Wallace Shawn, Gina Gershon, Louis Garrel, Elena Anaja; Film script: Woody Allen; Photography: Vittorio Storaro; Music: Stephane Wrembel; Assembly: Alisa Lepselter; Scenography: Alain Bainée; Costumes: Sonia Grande. Distribution: Vision. USA, Spain, Italy, 2020, 92 ‘.
In Florence it is in these rooms: Adriano, Fiorella, Principe.
May 7, 2021 | 15:33
© REPRODUCTION RESERVED
.