Thoughts Sparked by A Rainy Day in New York
Come with me to the South of France. I could do with your refreshing honesty. and you... can wake up to the smell of oranges
An all time great director, played by Liev Schreiber (up there with Renoir and de Sica), makes the above proposal to Elle Fanning, who plays the nervous wide-eyed co-ed who has managed to get an appointment to interview him.
It is a very Woody moment - a Zeussian fascination for Ganyemede.
Then we are shown a genius screenwriter, Jude Law, making at a pass at her, wondering aloud why her approbation matter so much to him. And then an Italian superstar stud makes moves on her.
All in a single day, which was supposedly the Manhattan weekend her boyfriend (Timothée Chalamet) and she have been planning.
In Timothée Chalamet we have a New Yorker who finds himself a fish-out-of-water even in an upstate New York college campus. His girlfriend Fanning is a former Arizonan beauty contestant. Now a journalism student- who is able to mistake Cole Porter for Shakespeare, is the famous Woody Pygmalion-ish mode. On the greyhound to NYC from their college campus upstate, she asks Chamalet, what questions she should be asking the director he is going to interview. 'How do you know so much!' she wonders.
For a long time now, critics have been eager to summarily dismiss his later works as tired rehashes of his lifelong themes. If anything, it is these summaries that are proving to be tired. From Irrational Man, to Cafe Society, to Wonder Wheel to here the man is in fine-form. Except the specific detail he wants to focus on, he is willing to dab everything with broad brushstrokes; but the details he decides to dwell on, it is a nuance/shade on his 'usual' obsessions.
Pygmalion
In a 2015 interview Woody Allen, when talking about his marriage to Soon-Yi Previn, said I was paternal. She responded to someone paternal....which kicked up much storm.
Crimes and Misdemeanors, has Martin Landau condescending to Angelica Huston. A decidedly unequal relationship that worked only as long as it was an aphrodisiac for him. The moment her desperation came forth ominously, Landau protects his marriage, which too he describes as one where his wife 'worships him'.
Then you have Sidney Pollack in Husbands and Wives relaxing with a 'cocktail waitress' Lysette Anthony before going 'what was I thinking' and crawling back to Judy Davis.
And Alvy Singer 'pulling-up' Annie Hall, only to see her take her new boyfriend to 'The Sorrow and the Pity' - which is among the list of things he introduced her to.
It would be well-nigh impossible, in this day and age (or, as some now suddenly argue, in any day and age) to have any sympathies for the Pygmalion. But in all these depictions, Woody hardly shows the man come out on top. He shows the man grasping desperately for happiness in a lost cause, only to come off eviscerated.
Fanning is more than keenly aware of what is happening on that extraordinary day. What the mature men are after. And - in a weak moment of screenwriting Woody resorts to her voicing out her dilemma - is clearly actively choosing to get intimate with the heartthrob star. She underplays, not just the nature of her relationship with Chamalet, she underplays Chamalet himself.
It is likely to perceived as a very Woody wishful imagination. A young girl actually dismissing an age-appropriate mate as 'too young' to play up her unbelievably lucky chance with a superstar.
Chalamet's elaborate plans slowly wilting; his position as the 'one who would show his Manhattan around' to the girl giving away to the girl being her own person with those charmed by her - leaving him to fend for himself is depicted with gnawing beauty.
Woody doesn't miss a single note while he ensures you are always in the midst of gauging the relationship, having mixed sympathies, witnessing transitions and insecurities. And all this while showing NYC as only he seems to be able to.
He can show couples walking through Monet in the Met, again and again for ages to come and it will still invoke a certain wistfulness like no-one else can.
Examined Life
The film dwells at length about examining everything. The weekend plans that get ruined are a series of precise locations famed for dinners, lunches and musics, exhibitions - assembled by the epicurean Chalamet. It is as if his personality of possessing certain tastes is also carefully cultivated. But he is too snobbish for a certain other kind of snobs. However the tastes he is tasked to cultivate are also the ones he rebels against 'Henry James puts me to sleep'. Does he possess a unique pitch, will he ever know? Will he always be up for measure?
In parallel his ex-girlfriend's sister, Selena Gomez, whom he chances upon during the day is anything but the 'wide eyed admirer'. She is evisceratingly honest. Actually even more, she 'keeps him honest'. And always teases him with a rating of his performance that her sister gave him.
In some ways reminiscent of the Pamela Adlon-Louis CK dynamic, covered here.
In an affecting, traditional manner the film ends with Chalamet seeming to leap to a native appropriateness, over an aspirational comfort.
The the 'lead' pair taking a stage coach ride in Central Park is the penultimate scene in Cafe Society too. And the last scenes are as different as Jesse Eisenberg and Chalamet's choices are in the two movies. If on were to think about, one could even say they made the exact opposite choices.
And we stand fascinated by the ruminations they enable.
P.S:
It is not that Woody did not get the memo. He has been laughing in its general direction.
His last movie, Wonder Wheel, was about a crazy lady, who - when her boyfriend falls for her stepdaughter - does something horrible.
In this movie, the protagonist is drawn to the charms of a girl who is his ex-girlfriend's younger sister; back then she was so young he had hardly noticed her, much less knew the wide eyed admiration she had for him.
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