Visuals enchant in Allen’s latest
Café Society K (out of 4) Starring Jesse Eisenberg, Kristen Stewart, Steve Carell, Blake Lively and Corey Stoll. Written and directed by Woody Allen. Opens Friday at the Varsity and Empress Walk theatres. 96 minutes. PG For his 47th feature, Woody Allen predictably convenes a bevy of boldface — Jesse Eisenberg, Kristen Stewart, Steve Carell and Blake Lively top the bill — but pleasantly surprises with a less celebrated hire behind the camera.
It’s cinematographer Vittorio Storaro ( Apocalypse Now, Reds), who brings to Allen’s work a visual dimension that has long been given lesser status to the writer/director’s words and increasingly slim concepts.
Storaro rapturously brings the film’s 1930s Hollywood setting into colourful focus, layering shades of indigo and amber that could make Terrence Malick swoon with delight.
It’s in service, alas, of yet another Allen movie where a significantly younger woman falls for an older man, something that also happened in his 2015 release Irrational Man.
Café Society stars the implacable Kristen Stewart as Vonnie, a beauty from Hollywood’s celebrated Golden Age, who falls for a narcissistic talent agent played by Steve Carell, 53.
Plot turns have Stewart’s character plucking heartstrings at the same time with Jesse Eisenberg’s nebbishy Bobby, a wannabe from the Bronx who is fleeing the constricts of his bothersome blue-collar parents (Jeannie Berlin and Ken Stott) and racketeering older brother (Corey Stoll).
The film barely plumbs the shallows of the N.Y./L.A. celeb swirl, but it is not without its pleasures. Stewart and Eisenberg make a cute, if not magnetic pair, her cool reserve meeting his neurotic bluster (he’s an obvious Allen surrogate), and Carell, Lively, Stoll and Berlin also have moments of genuine wit and sanguine insight.
“I’m kind of half-bored, half-fascinated,” Eisenberg tells his bro over the long-distance line, and the sentiment could also apply to the movie — although Storaro’s sumptuous cinematography makes even its mundane moments enchanting. Peter Howell