Live each day like it’s your last – and, some day, you’ll be right ! ~ Rose Dorfman

This is a response to, more than a review of, Café Society (2016)

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2 September

This is more of a response to, than a review of, Woody Allen's latest cinematic release, Café Society (2016)

There are, in Café Society (2016), quite a few familiar Allen(esque) themes (or concerns - a non-exhaustive list is assembling below), but is this a summation of them, and could it even (but one hopes that it does not !) serve as a swansong – in the way that, although Midnight in Paris (2011) was Woody Allen’s tribute to that city (and its past literary, artistic and social life), it was excessively lauded, and would hardly be a fit note to go out on… ?

For The Observer (in @guardian), Wendy Ide gives @cafesocietyfilm 3*, but is that mean ? :https://t.co/W3uT6elD24https://t.co/Ib2gVX0fXP

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) September 4, 2016

After all, Midnight in Paris is not a film that dreams this much, with Gil’s (Owen Wilson’s) entry into another world proving as easy as waiting for an old cab with T. S. Eliot in it¹, and its ending, which settles for finding love in the ‘here and now’, not with a former lover of – was it ? – Picasso’s, who herself hankers for an earlier time still. Rather, it is a direction that was perhaps indicated by Magic in the Moonlight (2014), an Allen film that was unnecessarily disesteemed, and wrongly criticized for what is also an element here – even though that is what happened in the films’ common era – i.e. a younger woman marrying a man at least twice her age².

(Though equally, in Blue Jasmine, both Jasmine (Cate Blanchett) and Ginger (Sally Hawkins) retreat into – whilst they last – blissful forms of dreaming impossibly for, respectively, what cannot be sustained, and what is too good to be true, or there are the brothers³ in Cassandra’s Dream (2007) (Colin Farrell and Ewan McGregor), who realise a dream at the start, but one whose consequences almost inexorably take them further and further from it.)

However, reading a summation of a career in film into Café Society is based on what... - as if Allen were the fictional director Mick Boyle (Harvey Keitel), in Paolo Sorrentino’s Youth (La giovinezza) (2015), but envisaging, if not desiring leaving, his testament in making film-within-a-film Life’s Last Day ? Apart, of course, from the allusiveness⁴ of the line, quoted from Bobby's mother in the title to this posting, Live each day like it’s your last – and, some day, you’ll be right !, nothing more than the work itself, and its feel. (Yet, at the same time, Allen just cannot resist telling us – alongside the film’s ambiguous interpretations of the observation that Dreams are… dreams – about dreams as we know that he sees them, putting in a plug for those centred on NYC (East Coast ‘chic’) over ones about LA (a West Coast illusion, which Bobby, unimpressed by its film industry, describes as a ‘boring, nasty, dog-eat-dog’ existence).



Interlude - An alphabetical selection (some spoilery ?) of concerns (or themes) familiar from the Allen filmography :


* Affairs: many examples, from the hilarious parody of ‘The Kreutzer Sonata’ in Love and Death (1975), to Husbands and Wives (1992) or Deconstructing Harry (1997)

* Central Park : Passim, but not least Manhattan (1979), Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)

* Confession being overheard by someone who should not know : Another Woman (1988), Everyone Says I Love You (1996)

* Dodgy relatives : Crimes and Misdemeanours (1989), Cassandra’s Dream (2007) [by no means the only point of contact between Cassandra and Crimes (sadly, via Match Point (2005))]

* Family : Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), Radio Days (1987)

* Financial advice, (possibly) untrustworthy : Celebrity (1998) [as well as the funniest scene ever with a banana !], Blue Jasmine (2013)

* Gangsters : Broadway Danny Rose (1984), Bullets Over Broadway (1994)

* Jewish gangsters : John Turturro’s Fading Gigolo (2013), in which Allen plays opposite Turturro - though, with Jewish gangsters, the primary reference must be Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America (1984)

* Jewishness : Stardust Memories (1980) , Oedipus Wrecks (in New York Stories (1989), with Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola)

* Night-clubs : Stardust Memories (1980), Radio Days (1987)

* Religious conversion : Love and Death (1975), Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)

Just as in Broadway Danny Rose (1984), and the tales told around the table about Danny (Allen himself) that frame it (or in Radio Days (1987), in which - as in other cases - Allen narrates, but does not appear), an infectious dream of life inhabits Café Society, i.e. the film itself and in its microcosm in the night-club that Bobby (Jesse Eisenberg) agrees to help [Ben] run as its manager (but is somehow guilelessly unaware of how it is run⁵ (NB possible spoiler in the end-note), until he comes to be able to change its name from Hangover to Les Tropiques).

Allen very deliberately gives us the fiction of the film itself, both how it is told to us visually (such that we know that it must all be there – all that information about the family, and who is who – for a reason, as yet unrevealed), and in the manner and style of his own narration, casual and urbane, and which even seems to make light of state or informal executions as if ‘one of those things’ that happen in life (the camera also does not dwell). (By contrast, Irrational Man (2015) had been in a different place altogether, and employed voice-overs by its interlocked principals, Emma Stone (Jill Pollard) and Joaquin Phoenix (Abe Lucas).)

Left to right : Mia Farrow, Barbara Hershey, Dianne Wiest

One can instructively look back to the effect of Allen’s voice-overs as Mickey in Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), partly when narrating his existential crisis (and how, by happenstance, The Marx Brothers came to resolve it) to Holly (Dianne Wiest) - with whom former relations, as one of Hannah’s said sisters, had been stormy and unpromising : because they had been, both of them (as here), where they were, and who they were, at the time. In Café Society, Allen uses the voice-over as our relation to a cinematic world that allows us to enter into the sheer dramatic contrivance that a man can choose to unburden himself to his younger relative about what, initially unbeknownst to either, also touches him the other – which feels awkward enough in itself, and yet it is only when, artlessly, the other passes on that story (although told in confidence) that the set-up fully unfolds, and, as a situation that it is to be repeated, we see a fight to maintain composure…

Ellen Page and Jesse Eisenberg in To Rome with Love

Quite apart from letting us see him use the cast as an ensemble (please see below), a more recent film, To Rome With Love (2012), is another that deserves more attention than it received, not just for being very good fun (and good natured, as Café Society is, and not Irrational Man (2015)), but also to be credited for being what it is – the work of a director who had the versatility, after Annie Hall (1977), to make Interiors (1978) (with all the brickbats that Allen got for it), and then make Manhattan, but also Stardust Memories (1980) (again, unjustly criticized). (To Rome with Love came before Blue Jasmine (2013) took people’s attention again (after Allen, for some reason, had it with Midnight in Paris).)

Alec Baldwin and Jesse Eisenberg in To Rome with Love

In To Rome with Love, Allen has Alec Baldwin maybe trying to help the younger man that he once was (again, Jesse Eisenberg) not make, amongst other mistakes, that of being seduced when he thought that he was seducing : it is one strand, amongst four, of wonder, which are presented with a tacitly agreed impossibility, but with none on its own asking us to credit it with the whole film. Nor exactly does Café Society, but not likewise, because it coheres around its elements in the way that Hannah and Her Sisters does (though with a different note on which to finish...).

As The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) did [which was claimed by Allen, at the time of the first edition of Woody Allen on Woody Allen, to be the film of his with which he was most pleased], Café Society revolves the question of the connectedness of image and substance – as well as the related one, both seen here and in others of his films (especially Blue Jasmine), of looking the other way as to where wealth comes from⁵ (NB possible spoiler in the end-note), or regarding the person from whom one wishes to acquire it.

Cate Blanchett and Alec Baldwin in Blue Jasmine

Perhaps the main sense, in Café Society, of a summation (if not of a conclusion) of a career inheres in a characteristic that it shares with that then-disliked film from 1980, Stardust Memories ? A strong sense of Allenesque couples who, though not exactly feeling regret, wonder What if... ?


And cause us to wonder deeply - when we might, instead, wonder about ourselves ?

Time passes… Life moves on… People change…

End-notes :

¹ Of course, on another level, dream is transmuted literally into wish-fulfilment for Gil, presenting as real the history that helped bring him to Paris – and overlook Inez’ own infidelity – until he realizes that he is chasing rainbows.

² It was there in Manhattan (1979) – which people usually forget was co-written with Marshall Brickman (as was Annie Hall (1977), not to omit the hilarity and foresight that is Sleeper (1973)) – and, from there (via Husbands and Wives (1992)), right up to Irrational Man (2015).

³ As it happens, Ginger and Jasmine are sisters by adoption, but not Cassandra's Terry (Farrell) and Ian (McGregor) - who, in Tom Wilkinson, have an Uncle Howard - with his line in calling in family favours...

⁴ Although, naturally one cannot go far in Allen's canon without hearing words that echo our mortality – even here, with Bobby's sister Evelyn's husband Leonard (Stephen Kunken), i.e. his brother-in-law, also talking - in the puzzled, but semi-humorous, way that his characters do - about Socrates and 'the life examined'…

⁵ Put another way, as in Cassandra’s Dream (2007) (or Match Point (2005)), getting what one wants - but at what cost ?

NB Possible spoiler : And one could ask – and will ask on a re-watching – why again, exactly, was it that Bobby went to see his uncle, Phil Stern, in LA (given that, back in NYC, Bobby is given a warning that Ben should consider disappear to Florida – which maybe Bobby 'forgot' to pass on ?)… Florida is also where Ben (Corey Stoll) was also heard urging Bobby's and his parents to go, just after Bobby has arrived in LA : as if form's sake, his mother, Rose Dorfman (Jeannie Berlin), superficially is concerned where Ben's money comes from, but then seems satisfied with some casual excuse ?


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Going for the double

This is a review of The Double (2013)

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5 April

This is a review of The Double (2013)

Anyone who is familiar with the trailer for The Double (2013) (though we should know that trailers are not made by the film-makers) is not going to expect Dostoyevsky’s novella to be any more than a jumping-off point for the film (as Thurber’s story is for The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013)), but what the trailer does do is to suggest misleadingly* that the latter is also a benign, and less dark, study in the nature of inadequacy.

Particularly at the start (before we meet Simon James’ double), it feels as though co-writers Richard Ayoade (who also directs) and Avi Korine (from that family whose members brought you, amongst other things, Spring Breakers (2012)) have ‘mashed up’ sources such as those that follow (although that feeling of making reference, or borrowing, does dissipate somewhat over time, as the propulsive nature of the telling takes over (please see below)) :

* Gogol’s story ‘The Overcoat’ (some see Dostoyevsky’s work, four years later, as a rebuttal of Gogol’s works)

* Yury Tynyanov’s Lieutenant Kijé (as popularized in Western Europe by Prokofiev’s Suite, Op. 60, distilled from his film-music)

* Brazil (1985)

* Rear Window (1954)

* Elements of Lynch (not least the feel, look, and sound of the world of Eraserhead (1977))

* Even The Apartment (1960)


Without saying more, one will see – unless one guesses – what aspects of the film correspond with the earlier material to make this disturbing whole, driven along by the Glass-like rapid string arpeggios of Andrew Hewitt’s score, or the low-frequency rumbling that makes the corridors seem so unnerving …


And that apart from other disturbances in James’ life of the kind given by Sally Hawkins in a nice authoritarian cameo, let alone the increasingly hostile security guard (IMDb puzzlingly says that it is ‘rumored’ that this was Kobna Holdbrook-Smith’s role), or the grumpy service in James’ local café (asked why he comes back here, he says that he is ‘loyal’ – and one cannot conceive of James doing anything very domestic in his flat, with utensils that look to be of grandmaternal origin).

In an early scene, in an underground train equally devoid of comfort (or a sense of the common good), we imagine that it must be a nightmare of the type in 8½ (1963), or a parody of one – James is, in what is established here, seen to be so labile that we have to hope hard that he can show himself as in the Mitty film, and maybe wonder whether he is more in the vein of Ronnie Corbett’s Timothy Lumsden in Sorry !.

In this film, partly because we are influenced to identify with Simon James (Jesse Eisenberg), partly because we look for an emergence into real life of The Replicator** (in the form of Paddy Considine), which James says is his favourite t.v. programme, we invest a hope in what might happen. We believe that Hannah (Mia Wasikowska) might respond to James (whose interest in her is reminiscent of that of Josef K. in Fraülein Bürstner in Kafka's The Trial ?), if he knew the right thing to do, and we believe in the notion from Roxanne (1987) (and its more illustrious antecedents) that he might he helped to, and for, his own good.

It might have been fun if Wasikwoska had doubled the part of Melanie, played by Yasmin Paige, to mimic Eisenberg’s duality : as it is, we are offered an insight into her character’s fragility, which has been exploited by a knowledge of that of James, and we see her torn, although not in a way that is not unusual in cinema (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) ?), between what attracts everyone else and the likelihood (which, with Marilyn’s Lorelei, fatally attracts, or at least fails to repel) of getting hurt.

Of course, the theme of betrayal by a seeming friend is an age-old one, pre-dating Judas, and which has resonated ever since, in, for example, the tables being turned on K. in Kafka’s The Castle by his assistants (themselves a form of substitute). Here, far more was possible with the topic of identity theft than the film encompasses, and it prefers to stay within the general bounds of what is a person and what about a person is perceived to make him or her worthwhile.

In the end, subverting the messages of James’ powerlessness (as we provisionally thought that it had to), it offers the sort of Pyrrhic victory*** that we know, for Ray, from In Bruges (2008). It is not unlike many other endings (e.g. from episodes of Star Trek (original series only, please) or Dr Who, amongst others), and so concludes the piece, nowhere near Dostoyevsky (unless we make some massive inferences), because there had to be some ultimate resolution.

That said, principals Wasikowska and Eisenberg are both excellent, and the film is not without an effect from how it contrasts the homeliness and colour of her flat with that of his, as well as from Hewitt’s score, and the levels of tension that it gives to this cheerless universe.



End-notes

* NB Contains a spoiler As does IMDb : A comedy centered on a man who is driven insane by the appearance of his doppleganger (sic).


** Shades of The Reprisalizer from Matthew Holness’ A Gun for George (2011) ?

Here, the t.v. series is a sort of Orwellian distraction from the predominant greyness of life in this place and time, though it is less clear that it is a degraded world of the kind that Gilliam’s referenced film gives us, or a reimagined instance of the early computer age a parallel for the world of the pre-Soviet government department.

The real Replicator in the film is Hannah (probably in more senses than one), because she is a junior member of the copying department, operating what some might describe as a steam-punk take-off of the large and clunky Xerox® machines from the late 1970s : James and she are amongst the few of an age in this organization. Her boss tells James that any sensible person would want two copies (which proves to be astute, although James does not want another he), not just the one that, as a pretext for being there, he keeps coming up and asking for.


*** You could even posit a reference to the scene with the Patronus across the lake in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004)…


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)