THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – MUST SEE
A tall blonde girl, barely out of her teens, walks the streets of Manhattan. At the corner of an avenue, she is drawn into the orbit of a filmmaker who could be her father. To those who have followed the director’s almost immobile journey, A rainy day in New York will offer for a long time the possibility of a reverse shot to Manhattan (1979), opening the door to an alternative version of the universe of the author ofAnnie Hall (1977) and Crimes and misdemeanors (1990).
In this other space-time, youth has taken control, its desires and fantasies guide the comedy. The artists, settled in adulthood – director, screenwriter, actor – are worth seeing, or not, just like the Brooklyn Bridge or the Empire State Building.
In his last sequences, A rainy day in New York does not keep those promises. It was probably asking a lot of an 83-year-old man to recreate his world in the image of two very young people from the beginning of the XXIe century.
It all started a few hundred kilometers from Central Park in a university in the Northeast, where Gatsby Welles (Timothée Chalamet) was exiled by his mother, a pillar of good New York society, who hopes that his offspring will cultivate more his intellect as his gifts for poker and gambling den piano. The young man has seduced Ashleigh (Elle Fanning), heir to a Texan banker, whose reserves of enthusiasm are equal to those of oil from her native state. In a few shots, Woody Allen obtains from these two ultramodern actors the reincarnation of a couple coming out of a comedy of the Hollywood golden age. The weary worldliness that Gatsby displays, the effervescence of Ashleigh could be those of Cary Grant and Ginger Rogers.
Incarnation of the New York male
Then it’s time to get them on the bus to New York. There, the journalism student has to interview Roland Pollard (Liev Schreiber), a tormented director who is about to finish the postproduction of his latest feature film, and existential questions about his living environment. The literary student, full of money after a long night of poker, hopes that the interview will be completed quickly, in order to make the hotel bar crawl he imagined for his girlfriend last as long as possible.
Barely stepped on the pavement of Manhattan, the two paths separate. As Ashleigh follows in the filmmaker’s wake, Gatsby grapples with the ghosts of his New York life: his brother, his former high school mates and one of them, Shannon’s sister (Selena Gomez), as brown and caustic as the Texan is blonde and idealistic.
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