Café Society
Woody Allen’s new film seems bewitched by the lustre it purports to scorn.
Eisenberg as Bobby Dorfman does a great Woody Allen analogue, dragging out the last syllable into a whine.
Anew Woody Allen picture has been an annual event for well over half a century, so we ought to know the drill by now: settle in, tap the rhythms of whatever jazz piece plays over the opening credits, shush the theatre’s still-chattering philistines and hold your breath for the incoming voice-over. Usually it’s a doozy: “Chapter One: He was as tough and romantic as the city he loved. Behind his black-rimmed glasses was the coiled sexual power of a jungle cat. Oh I love this …” ( Manhattan) or “Isn’t all mankind executed for a crime it never committed? The difference is that all men go eventually, but I go at six o’clock tomorrow. It was supposed to be five o’clock but I have a smart lawyer who got leniency” ( Love and Death).
But in Café Society, Woody Allen’s latest film set during the 1930s, we get this: “When the sun starts to dip in the Hollywood hills, the light often takes on the saturated loveliness of colour by technicolour.”
Huh? He sounds like a tenured professor stumbling through a community college lecture. What, no irony? No gag? Disappointment looms. And anyway, the camera is showing us exactly that, gliding alongside the blued pool of a white deco mansion, milling party guests in buttered tuxes with grosgrain trim.
If it weren’t for Allen’s muttering, we’d be paying more attention to this refinement. But he’s streaking ahead, introducing us to Phil Stearn (Steve Carrell) as the camera arrives on him holding court. “I’m expecting a call from Ginger Rogers!” he exclaims. I’d never pictured Rogers using a phone, figuring she just tap-danced Morse code. It’s not her calling, anyway, but Phil’s sister in New York. Her son is heading to Hollywood. Get him a job, would you?
Enter Jesse Eisenberg as Bobby Dorfman, doing the best Woody Allen analogue in years. He has the same gulping patter, the same ascending intonation dragging out the last syllable into a perceptible whine. What does Bobby make of Hollywood? “It’s sunny and warm, but it’s not New York.” And there it is, that laconic
deprecation. You can relax back into the anxious moaning peppered with black comedy and finished off with a Jewish shrug that has marked Woody’s best work.
As in the last act of Annie Hall, Bobby is a fish out of water, or rather, a New Yorker out of New York. He’s used to the slummy metropolis, so Hollywood’s riches knock him, and us, over the head. Shot by Vittorio Storaro (who worked on Apocalypse Now!, Reds and Last Tango in Paris), the film is a carousel of cream, custard and milky peach finery. Cheesecake smoking jackets. Evening gowns that ripple like the slow run of a vanilla milkshake flaked with gold. “Can you believe the studio makes us wear fur in this heat?” a radiant bombshell says. I sure can, and I’m endlessly grateful.
The best decadence is saved for Kristen Stewart, who plays Vonnie, Bobby’s love interest (even though she has a boyfriend, a lothario hidden for plot reasons). One scene seizes you like an electric shock: over a regular dinner setting, we cut to Stewart’s face and – bam! – there she is, lit from below, gorgeous, incandescent, as serene as Bergman in Casablanca. (In my notes, this shot was denoted by a single exclamation mark.) It’s so good, and Stewart is so perfect for it, that Allen repeats the transition later in a single take.
This is classic Old Hollywood, full of heightened gorgeousness, but that marks the film’s clever paradox. Allen has it both ways by indulging an unattainable idealisation of beauty while sneering at the vacuity that created it – a “boring, nasty, dog-eat-dog industry”, as one character notes.
The Tammany senators and smirking thugs of New York’s upper strata are rebuked too. If we dared look outside the nightclub doors of either city in this era, as in The Purple Rose of Cairo, we’d find grubby men out of work, lining up for bread and soup.
These false fevered riches can never sustain love, which, after all, is what
Allen has always been searching for in his grander films. He signs off Café Society, like Manhattan, with a melancholic and languid tune. Dance while you can, he drily implies, because this wonderful lustre won’t last. IN CINEMAS OCTOBER 20
This is classic Old Hollywood, full of heightened gorgeousness.