Woody Allen gives himself a happy ending in his latest film. At the Delacorte clock in Central Park, in the heart of New York. The city of missed, imaginary, and yet mostly magically successful dates.
The city that we experience in “A Rainy Day in New York” was created by Woody Allen almost single-handedly over decades, a fairy tale, a dream realm, populated with crazy, sometimes boring protagonists, in the dignified apartments of Manhattan, where the young hero – his name is Gatsby – is irresistibly drawn to the piano to intone the song “Everything Happens to Me”. Vittorio Storaro, who once made the films by Bertolucci and Coppola shine brilliantly, now lets his warm, dense light penetrate the gray of the rainy city again, very sophisticated, illuminated by great philosophy from Aristotle to Wittgenstein.
Woody Allen is not one who can really love his characters, he remains suspicious of them. He is torn, distrusts any kind of naivety and yet is fascinated by all sorts of clichés. Ashleigh Enright, for example, a girl from Tucson played by Elle Fanning, is over the moon; she has been promised an interview with the director Roland Pollard (Liev Schreiber) in Manhattan for the student magazine of her small university. Her friend Gatsby, son of wealthy New York parents (Timothée Chalamet), will accompany her and put together a great program for the weekend, from visiting an exhibition to a cocktail hour at the Carlyle. What he doesn’t want at all: to attend the annual parents’ reception, which is scheduled just this weekend.
Woody Allen made a real Nouvelle Vague film when he was over eighty. The middle-aged men are grotesque horror characters, director “Rolly”, his screenwriter Ted Davidoff (Jude Law) and his star actor Francisco Vega (Diego Luna). Ashleigh has a firm grip on the diffuse web of artistic creativity with which she surrounds herself – she reacts with hiccups and blackouts. Elle Fanning plays it with a rather uncomfortable helplessness. The film is wicked – and more desperate – than many of Woody Allen’s earlier works.
Woody Allen loves cities in the rain – sunshine only depresses him, he said
Gatsby’s a little easier than Ashleigh. When he is transferred by her – she is being towed to a screening of Rolly’s film – he meets Shannon (Selena Gomez), the younger sister of an ex-girlfriend, and has to kiss her in the car because he is the actor when shooting a student film – alternative Filmmaking! In the end, Gatsby even opens his mouth, and then the rain sets in, which the title promises. Woody Allen loves cities in the rain – “When I open the curtains in the morning and the sun shines, I am depressed”.
In 2017, when the film was made, the “Me Too” debate broke into America’s consciousness, and with it came back the accusation made by his ex, Mia Farrow, that Woody Allen molested his adopted daughter Dylan in 1992 – what of this one is violently disputed. The young stars of “Rainy Day” wanted nothing more to do with the film and with the persona non grata Woody Allen, Timothée Chalamet, Selena Gomez and Rebecca Hall passed their fees on to organizations like Time’s Up. An inextricable web of morality and professionalism and character. The Amazon Studio did not evaluate the film it produced in the USA and terminated a four-film contract with everyone. The film is only shown in cinemas in Europe; in France it has also opened the Deauville film festival. Woody Allen set his next film in San Sebastián and shot it in August.
Timothée Chalamet appears dynamic in his casual tweed jacket like the young Antoine Doinel once did in François Truffaut’s films. He goes to the Metropolitan Museum of Art with Shannon, is impressed by John Singer Sargent’s “Madame X” and then ends up in the Egyptian one Department, in a hectic game of hide-and-seek between sloping dark museum walls – “They’re strange, these Egyptians, they bet everything on the afterlife.” Will he manage that, a completely different life that eludes the economic system of American society, at the piano or at the poker table?
As he is sitting in the Carlyle with thousands of dollars won, a woman comes to his table, fantastic as in a film noir – she reminds of Jane Greer, who appears in Robert Mitchum in “Out of the Past”. I make dreams come true, she explains. For five hundred dollars a night. A few hours later he will learn, from his mother, what the real basis of the American family and society, of American success, is.
A Rainy Day in New York, USA 2019 – Director, Book: Woody Allen. Camera: Vittorio Storaro. Editor: Alisa Lepselter. With: Timothée Chalamet, Elle Fanning, Selena Gomez, Jude Law, Diego Luna, Liev Schreiber. NFP / Filmwelt, 92 minutes.
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