‘Rifkin’s Festival’ Film Review: Woody Allen Returns to Spain, and a Very Dry Well, for His 49th Feature
thewrap.comth feature film, Allen returns to a well that is not so much dry as desiccated. The movie opens with Wallace Shawn as our Allen doppelgänger, Mort Rifkin.
Mort, an anxious former professor, is also a dedicated cinephile and self-defined intellectual who spends the next hour and a half complaining vociferously to his analyst.He’s reminiscing about a troubled trip to Spain’s San Sebastián Film Festival, which he recently took with his publicist wife, Sue (Gina Gershon). “Film festivals are no longer what they were,” Mort grouses to the therapist. “I taught cinema as Art: the great European masters.
I only went because I couldn’t shake the suspicion she had a little crush on this bulls–t movie director she did publicity for.”As we flash back to Spain to relive the trip with Mort, we find it increasingly tough to blame Sue for her potentially roving eye.
The director, Philippe (Louis Garrel, “Little Women”), is meant to be a pretentious fool. But Mort, who never stops sighing about the flaws he sees around him, is infinitely worse.
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