Rifkin’s Festival addresses the question, why do people like Woody Allen think the movies by European directors in the 1950s and 1960s were great when most people don’t care for them?  Is it that those directors were so profound that only deep thinkers like Allen can appreciate them, while the rest of us are too superficial to get the point?  Or are people like Allen just being pretentious, despising Hollywood movies on the grounds that anyone could enjoy those things.  Of course, Allen is guilty of making enjoyable Hollywood movies himself.  In any event, Allen seems to have his own doubts on the matter, and in this movie, he takes a critical look at himself.

Mort Rifkin, played by Wallace Shawn, is a stand-in for Allen.  At one point, he reflects on the bad decisions he has made during his life, saying, “Like maybe I really was a snob, the sort of pedantic ass who puts people off with my so-called highbrow taste.”

Most of the movie is told as a flashback in which Mort is presumably talking to his therapist, just as Allen has been going to therapists most of his life.  I assume that people go to therapists because they are unhappy, and we have to wonder if that has anything to do with Allen’s taste in movies.

Mort tells of how he had to quit working on the novel he was writing in order to accompany his wife Sue to the San Sebastian Film Festival.  Sue is played by Gina Gershon, a beautiful woman that seems ill-matched with the homely Wallace Shawn, whose belly always seems to be sticking out. Gershon is about twenty years younger than Shawn, and as he is only five feet, two inches tall, he is shorter than she is.

Regarding this novel that Mort has been working on, he keeps tearing up the pages he writes because they are not good enough.  He doesn’t want to write another mediocre novel, but a “masterpiece,” one that will put him in “the big leagues,” with “Joyce and Dostoevsky.”  We know he will never succeed. People that write great novels do so because they have something to say, not because they want to be known for writing a great novel.

Mort says that back when he taught a film class, he would have been thrilled to go to a film festival. “But film festivals,” he goes on to say, “are no longer what they were.  I mean, it was no longer what I was teaching.  I taught Cinema as Art:  The Great European Masters.”  He goes on to say, “I only went because I couldn’t shake the suspicion that [Sue] had a little crush on this bullshit movie director she did publicity for.”

That director would be Philippe, who is tall, good-looking, and about Sue’s own age besides.  We have to wonder if the director really is “bullshit,” or whether his movies are actually quite good, and Mort’s jealousy makes him incapable of appreciating them.  Philippe’s latest movie is an anti-war film, but it is a fictitious movie, one we cannot watch for ourselves in order to judge whether it is any good.

But that raises the question, if it was a real movie, and I could watch it, would I be able to judge whether it was any good?  After all, if I don’t care for any of those movies made by the European directors that Mort thinks are great, then how could I tell whether Philippe’s movie is as bad as Mort says or whether it deserves to be praised?

A major criticism Mort has about Philippe’s movies is that they are political. Mort says politics is ephemeral, missing the big questions, about “God, death, the meaning of life,” questions such as, “What’s it all about?” and “Is this everything there is, or is there more?”  Mort concludes, “I mean, those are the questions that really matter.  The things [Philippe] deals with are actually trivial, although he thinks they’re so profound.”

Sue invites Philippe to have dinner at a restaurant with Mort and her, much to Mort’s chagrin. Sue and Philippe get into an intense conversation, at times their faces within inches of each other.  No matter how many times Mort tries to be a part of that conversation, as he sits on the opposite side of the table, he is ignored.  Well, after all, three is a crowd.  That night, he has a Jules and Jim dream, in which, like Jules, he will be cuckolded.

In fact, throughout this movie, Mort has dreams or fantasies in which there are allusions, visual or verbal, to movies.  It’s been a long time since I saw most of those movies, but as best as I can tell, they are as follows, in order of the year in which they were made:  Citizen Kane (1941), The Seventh Seal (1957), Wild Strawberries (1957), Breathless (1960), Last Year at Marienbad (1961), Jules and Jim (1962), The Exterminating Angel (1962), Chushingura (1962), 8½ (1963), Red Desert (1964), A Man and a Woman (1966), Persona (1966), and Claire’s Knee (1970).

The first one on the list, Citizen Kane, is an exception.  It is an American movie, and it is the only movie on the list that I enjoyed watching.  Another exception is Chushingura.  It is Japanese.  The rest are European, the ones that Mort counts a being among those made by “the Great European Masters.”

In any event, I suppose these are the movies that address what Mort calls the “big questions.” So, did any of these movies ever provide the answers?  If they did provide the answers, we can quit asking those questions and move on to something else, like politics, perhaps; if they did not provide the answers to those questions, they why does Mort think those movies are so important?

Perhaps that misses the point.  What is important, Mort might argue, is that these movies raise the big questions, not that they answer them, since they obviously do not.  But what is so special about that?  People don’t need to go to a movie to wonder about God, death, and the meaning of life.  In any event, when I watched those movies, I did sometimes wonder, “What’s it all about?” and “Is this everything there is, or is there more,” but I was asking it about the movies, not about life.

There is another peculiar thing about this list of movies.  The last one to be produced was in 1970. Rifkin’s Festival was made in 2020, fifty years later.  Is Allen, through Mort, saying that there have been no movies of that quality made after 1970?  Again, I am in no position to answer that question. Since I didn’t care for those European movies when I saw them, I am not the one to judge whether movies of that caliber have been made since.

In one of Mort’s dreams, he is having dinner with a bunch of other people, including a woman he once loved.  She mentions how Mort took her to see three of the above movies, and in each case, she was bored, so she married his brother. Mort’s brother says, “Mort regards any movie that entertains or shows a profit as suspect.”

Someone at the party says to Mort, “OK, Mr. Big Film Maven, tell us what we should rent to watch up here.” It is then that Mort recommends Chushingura, and he goes on in great detail about who made it, who starred in it, who wrote the music, and so forth, all of them being Japanese names that no one has ever heard of.  As he does so, people start rolling their eyes and giving each other sidelong glances. In other words, in his dreams, Mort realizes what people think of him.

In other dreams, we see how trying to interpret one’s own life in terms of these movies simply does not work, except as humor.  In a dream alluding to Persona, Sue and Jo, a female doctor that Mort has fallen in love with, start discussing him. Sue says that she was tempted to have an affair with other men, but she resisted. “The silence of God drove me crazy,” she says to Jo, “until one day he spoke to me. And God said, ‘I’ve seen Mort, and if I were you, I’d definitely cheat on him.’”  Jo says that God punishes us for our sins, and Mort’s sin is that he likes movies with subtitles.

In a dream version of 8½, a rabbi from his past questions whether Mort is a true Jew.  “What would God say if you met face to face?”

Mort replies, “After what God’s done, I have nothing to say to him.  Let him talk to my lawyer.”

“Who but a Jew would think of suing God?” another person asks.

“Who but a Jew would have a slam-dunk case?”

At one point, Mort dreams he is playing chess with Death, alluding, of course, to The Seventh Seal. After a few moves, Death gets up and leaves, saying he’ll be back one day, but to put off that day as long as possible, Death recommends eating lots of fruits and vegetables, avoiding saturated fat, exercising every day, and having regular colonoscopies.

And so, these European films provide material for Allen’s jokes.  But as Nietzsche said, “A joke is an epigram on the death of a feeling.”

As far as Mort’s real life is concerned, his obsession with Jo is hard to watch. Woody Allen is a funny-looking little guy, and he has made us laugh over the years watching him try to get somewhere with women, which he usually does in the end, somehow.  But Mort’s unrequited love for Jo is pathetic, and as Mort is Allen’s avatar, this must have been the most painful form of self-criticism in the entire movie.

Sue, on the other hand, tells Mort she is leaving him for Philippe, with whom she has been having an affair, which she says is not like her, and the fact that she is a married woman almost ruined all the sex she was having.

The movie ends back in the therapist’s office, with Mort asking him, “So, do you have anything to say to me after everything that I’ve told you?”

The therapist doesn’t say anything.  But then, he doesn’t have to.  Woody Allen has already said it.