Rifkin’s Festival

With 50 feature films to his credit and his scandal-ridden career winding down, Rifkin’s Festival finds Woody Allen stuck in the past.

Working well within his comfort zone, the prolific auteur’s latest breezy romantic comedy is a heartfelt love letter to classic European cinema. Yet it’s also an implausible and uninspired trifle content to rehash familiar themes while relying on variations of characters we’ve seen plenty of times before.

Mort (Wallace Shawn) is a fledgling New York author and former film professor who accompanies his wife, Sue (Gina Gershon) to the San Sebastian Film Festival in Spain. She’s handling publicity for Philippe (Louis Garrel), a young director whose new project is drawing raves.

The trip coincides with a marital rut for the couple. Mort assumes that Sue is having an affair with Philippe and throws acerbic barbs at the young prodigy at every opportunity. He becomes consumed by his own jealousy and insecurities, both personally and professionally.

Meanwhile, Mort is forced to navigate an existential crisis that involves reconciling with his past and pondering his future while his present relationship crumbles before his eyes.

Some chest pains prompt the hypochondriac Mort to visit a local doctor (Elena Anaya), who he finds alluring. The two lost souls find companionship amid the chaos around them, but will their fling become anything more?

Digging into his usual bag of satirical tricks, Allen pokes fun at academia, celebrity, journalism, and Hollywood’s obsession with commerce over creativity.

Shawn’s neurotic and casually cynical portrayal seems to channel the filmmaker himself. The film’s inconsequential deconstruction of the contemporary movie landscape feels like a cathartic exploration of Allen’s place within it.

Filmed in part at the festival itself, the movie benefits from some lush exotic scenery along the Spanish coast—reflective of Allen becoming enamored with European locales late in his career. Rifkin’s Festival features a handful of lovely black-and-white fantasy sequences that salute Fellini, Truffaut, Godard, and others who’ve likely influenced Allen during the past half-century.

Tossing off some insider gags, the film is made for cinephiles, by a cinephile. However, the screenplay generates some amusing character dynamics and scattered big laughs without adding up to much in the end.

Rated PG-13, 88 minutes.