Résumé : Two students, Gatsby and Ashleigh, plan to spend a romantic weekend in New York. But their project comes to an end, as quickly as the rain succeeds the good weather … Soon separated, each of the two lovebirds connects fortuitous encounters and unusual situations.
Critique : Woody Allen’s cinema has its roots in New York. In the meantime, he has taken his camera to the biggest romantic metropolises in Europe. But he returns again to his first loves, to his favorite city, which he has been filming like no one else, for nearly sixty years. In a way, Allen is to New York what Almodóvar is to Madrid or Barcelona. He knows its colors, its inhabitants and its sounds. He knows how to capture the precise moments of the lungs of Big Apple, like a photographer on the lookout for a tourist shot. Suddenly, this rainy megalopolis becomes almost universal in the eyes of the spectators. You can recognize Central Park, the buzzing avenues of shops, and it exudes an incredible sensuality. It is therefore no coincidence that the title of the film gives the spotlight to New York City, which is a sort of luminous character in its own right, alongside its young heroes, Gatsby and Ashleigh. But more than New York, it is on its bourgeois and casual communities that the filmmaker sets his gaze. Certainly, and the reproach is easy, the director, accustomed to money and splinters, describes his own social and cultural environment, but self-criticism and cynicism take precedence over the ease of self-fiction.
- Copyright 2019 Gravier Productions
The older Allen gets, the more his cinema simplifies the effects, to concentrate on writing and an almost minimalist production. There are no more tracking shots, the portraits are simple, and the stylistic outline becomes the main leitmotif. In fact, the author of Manhattan is more a writer than a filmmaker. The dialogues conceal treasures of language and we are surprised to think that ultimately the film could be staged endlessly, like a play. Allen cultivates with a lot of modesty and humor, a literary writing. His young hero, Gatsby, is himself a literary student, turning himself into a sort of double for the director. We hear in his texts great authors like Shakespeare certainly, but especially the mocking joke of Oscar Wilde. It is also clear that the feature film A rainy day in New York is more English than American. There is in all these characters the famous British phlegm and a sort of bourgeois smugness, just as funny as it is distressing.
- Copyright 2019 Gravier Productions
Allen’s film comes out almost at the same time as Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood. It is not a coincidence. The two cinema monsters indeed sign a kind of testamentary work, which pays homage to the seventh art, but also settles accounts with the small protected and unbearable environment of recognized artists. The main subject is love. Whether you are young, rich, famous, or quite the opposite, the real desire that runs through man is to give meaning to his existence, through the eyes of those he loves. Here, the characters indulge in lies, pretense, without giving in to outrageous schematization. There is never any heaviness in the subject and the director does not fail, evoking the caricature of a golden youth. Allen loves his characters, and consequently the actors who embody them. Timothée Chamalet, Elle Fanning and Selena Gomez play these young people with delicacy and humor, alongside more assertive artists, such as Jude Law and Diego Luna. There is nothing wrong with this more cynical than romantic comedy.
- Copyright 2019 Gravier Productions
And of course, as often with the filmmaker, there is jazz, whispered like a breath from the heart of New York City. Certainly, when Timothée Chamalet sits behind a piano and pretends to play a piece to perfection, it is Woody Allen’s little music that appears on the screen. Truly, A rainy day in New York is the best of Woody Allen movies, in a decade.
– .
