After Twilight
Despite Kristen Stewart’s star turn, Woody Allen’s Café Society is unmemorable
The rain thankfully let up, Kristen Stewart arrived on the red carpet in a see-through black blouse, hair dyed blonde, lips pursed, and touching the shoulder of her director, Woody Allen, as they entered the Grande Theatre Lumiere to view Café Society, the opening film of the 69th Cannes Film Festival.
Post- Twilight, the American actress has emerged, unlikely as it seems, as a new arthouse muse, with two films in the world’s most prestigious film event that kicked off on Wednesday. Besides Café Society, she’ll star in the French film Personal Shopper, working again with one of France’s most respected directors Olivier Assayas. We’ll get to that next week.
From a girl best known for looking bored, Stewart has developed a screen persona of a slightly arrogant and perpetually vulnerable woman. That said, she does her best to light up Allen’s Café Society, a dull, run-of-the-mill screwball set in 1930s Hollywood. It’s just that Allen has to make one film a year — it has become a habit of sort, regardless of the quality of the output — and Cannes loves him enough to give him the opening slot and the red-carpet hype.
We still hope with all sincerity that Allen marching on in his late opus would give us another Vicky Cristina Barcelona, if not Match Point, and every time the hope is dashed. Not that Café Society is bad; not quite. It just seems pointless, a light comedy so light it disappears from your head as soon as you leave the seat. And the Cannes’ opening was the way the festival honoured him — and more importantly to have Stewart and her co-stars, Blake Lively and Jesse Eisenberg, strutting down steps.
Eisenberg plays Bobby, a Jewish boy from Manhattan who moves to Los Angeles to try his luck in the movie business. Steve Carell plays his uncle, a wealthy agent who takes young Bobby under his wing and introduces him to his secretary, Vonnie (Stewart), a Nebraskan girl who thinks she’s seen through the follies of Hollywood. Orbiting around each other, telling lies and breaking hearts, they make Café Society a love triangle of sorts, though the plot seems like a thin excuse for Allen’s witticism (which still works), his playful jibes at the shallowness and irresistible glamour of the industry in its heyday, with plenty of Jewish jokes in the mix.
Name-dropping here doesn’t sound like name-dropping, since Allen simply chose to set his story at a time of all those vintage names: Ginger Rogers, Grace Kelly, Spencer Tracy et al. If nothing else, the costume and sun-kissed cinematography will convince you to stick around.
Allen’s experiments with young actors have yielded uneven results. Scarlett Johansson got him, and even transcended the material written for her. Emma Stone, not quite, and thus Magic In The Moonlight was totally devoid of magic. Now Stewart takes on the task with haughty flair, at once contained by the shell assigned to her and yet trying to move beyond it. Her Vonnie can’t quite become a feeling woman with flesh and blood (Blake Lively even less so), though we don’t mind seeing her sparring with Carell and Eisenberg, who’s yet another of Allen’s neurotic Jewish boys looking for a place in the world. For the ongoing Cannes Film Festival, we should now look forward to her role in Personal Shopper, which is in the main competition. Two years ago, she made her Cannes debut in Assayas’s Clouds Of Sils Maria, a magnificent story about life, acting and art — against the odds, she even won the Cesar award for best actress, a French equivalent of the Oscars. There’s certainly life after Twilight for Stewart; hers is a career worth keeping an eye on.
Café Society will open in Thailand later this year.
Stewart has developed a screen persona of a slightly arrogant and perpetually vulnerable woman