Cannes 2016: Cafe Society Review

After planting himself very firmly in the present for the last few years, with a whirlwind tour of Europe whilst at it, Woody Allen has been having reasonable box-office success as well as critical acclaim for many of his latest films, most notably Blue Jasmine. However, after dipping his toe back into the past with Midnight in Paris, and diving right back in with Magic in the Moonlight, Allen has fully immersed himself in the past he loves so much.

Café Society is set in 1930s and lurches between his beloved New York and Hollywood, a city with which he is less enamoured. The story revolves around Bobby Dorfman (Jessie Eisenberg), a New York Jew desperate to escape the lowly family jewellery store and seek his fortunes in Hollywood, where his Uncle Phil (Steve Carell) is a successful agent. After numerous unsuccessful attempts to have a meeting with his uncle, and an equally unsuccessful attempt to hire a hooker, Bobby finally gets the meeting – and a job to boot. But will he get the girl? For Phil has set him up with Vonnie (Kristen Stewart) to show him around town. He falls head over heels, but she is already taken.

Allen uses voiceover (narrated by the director himself) and flashbacks to fill us in on all the various characters and their stories: we meet the members of the Dorfman family, which includes brother Ben (Corey Stoll) – “one of the few Jews in the neighbourhood not to get an education” – who has chosen a path of organized crime, and his sister who married the Communist intellectual. With the nagging mother who occasionally laments in Yiddish and the honest, but modest jeweller father, Allen’s family ticks all the Jewish cliché boxes. Which is not to say the family seems unauthentic or unbelievable, and this is thanks not only to the writing but to the performances of all concerned, which are never tip over into melodrama or histrionics.

As Bobby, Eisenberg has inherited a few of Allen’s signature tics and traits, and when we see him pacing his apartment in his white undershirt and baggy brown trousers, we have a sense of déjà vu, for he evokes all those myriad celluloid images of Allen. There is also something familiar about Vonnie and Bobby deriding the Hollywood scene: the business deals, the name dropping, the superficiality of the place, a topic caustically covered in Annie Hall. Yet Allen also shows the allure of Tinseltown. The New York Bobby leaves behind is all sepia-toned drabness, but Hollywood is seeped in golden hues, the film imbued with LA’s wonderful light. We have the double Oscar winner Vittorio Storaro to thank for the amazing cinematography. And with these tones Allen is reminding us why moviemakers flocked to Hollywood at the turn of the last century, and he is a little softer on the town than he has been of old.

Unfortunately, Steve Carell, who is the best thing in the film, is sorely underused, as is the immensely watchable Parker Posey, who is very much a one-dimensional character – all toothy smiles and eternal optimism. As with the women who dated Woody’s characters in previous films, the audience asks themselves how someone with as few charms as Bobby could ever get the likes of Kristen Stewart or beautiful (and again underused) Blake Lively.

So, there we have it. Another charming, witty, beautifully filmed and well-written Woody Allen film. But is it as charming and witty as, say, The Purple Rose of Cairo or Crimes and Misdemeanours? No, but it is clear that whilst reaching the twilight years of his career, Allen is still not completely on the wane. Eisenberg and Stewart make a fine and funny couple and both are endearing in their respective roles. And as the characters look wistfully back at their past, we in the audience look back on Allen’s past glories with a wistful little sigh of our own.