Rifkin's Festival is a Love Letter to Art Films

Woody Allen's latest celebrates the fine art of appreciation.

The Middlebrow watched Rifkin’s Festival alongside the Scholar Wife and The Rennaisance Son on Saturday morning. We rented a stream from Apple, though it’s a movie that would best be enjoyed in a small, art house theatre. A master of both mediums, Allen views film and television as separate arts and while all of his movies stress the psychological over the spectacle, he intends for them to be watched in theaters, both for the quality of the screens and for the communal experience.

We talk a lot about movies as mental escape — a way to visit characters and locales that don’t show up in every day life, or sometimes even on the most extraordinary days. But for somebody who grew up as Allen did, in overpacked households of far Brooklyn, movie theatres were physical escapes. As we’ve brought better entertainment equipment into less densely packed homes, that escape has become less important to society, but remains vital to the filmmaker. For Allen, a movie house symbolizes a kind of luxury — maybe one that can only be duplicated in the 2020s by the prospect of a whole film festival, hosted in an exotic, European city.

Rifkin’s Festival is an important part of Allen’s canon because he returns to a deeply cherished theme — that the ability to appreciate art is tied to the ability to live a happy life. Wallace Shawn shines as Mort Rifkin, a film critic and professor who accompanies his film publicist wife Sue (Gina Gershon), to the San Sebastien International Film Festival in Spain. There, Rifkin has vivid dreams that recall films by European titans like Fellini, Truffaut and Bergman. As Rifkin’s marriage falls apart, he confronts how his tastes and obsessions have defined his life and wonders if his self-imposed snobbery has kept him from experiencing true joy. His emotional struggle manifests in a chess match with Death, played by Christoph Waltz.

Allen doesn’t make sequels, but some of his films group together well. Manhattan Murder Mystery, for example, seems like what might have happened had Alvy and Annie stuck together after Annie Hall. Rifkin’s Festival plays like a companion piece to Allen’s works about artists, art and creativity — Stardust Memories and later Deconstructing Harry.

In the prior films, the protagonist was an artist — a filmmaker in one and an author in the other. This time, we get the perspective of the critic and teacher — a professional appreciator of great art, but not its creator.

The joys of artistic appreciation is a recurring theme in Allen’s work. In Manhattan, for example, Ike finds himself at odds with peers who have invented an “Academy of the Overrated” to which they consign F. Scott Fitzgerald, Vincent van Gogh and Mozart. “All of those people are absolute geniuses,” Allen retorts. “Every single one of them.” Later, Allen tape records a list of things that bring him happiness, which includes: “Groucho Marx, the second movement of Mozart's "Jupiter" Symphony, Louis Armstrong's recording of Potato Head Blues, Flaubert's A Sentimental Education, Cezanne's still lifes of apples and pears…”

Life might be meaningless, but that doesn’t mean it has to be depressing. A person can choose joy in art, nature or life. Rifkin realizes that he was happiest as a professor — discussing ideas and encouraging young people to find joy in art.

This notion comes up in Allen’s film Husbands and Wives as well, where writing professor Gabriel Roth muses, “You can’t teach writing. All you can do is expose people to the great works of literature and hope it inspires them.” Professor Rifkin is a few steps ahead of Professor Roth, but the idea that appreciation is its own reward comes through clearly from both characters.

The more things you can appreciate, the happier you’ll be. The Middlebrow also ventures that appreciating more and more diverse types of art makes you smarter. One of Rifkin’s tragedies is that he lived his life unable to appreciate more pedestrian amusements. He took his love of European and arthouse cinema so far that it seems he couldn’t find joy in something like Airplane! or The Naked Gun movies, much less a superhero throwdown.

In the end, Rifkin’s Festival ends with the afirming message that life is here for our enjoyment, but we have to put in the effort to appreciate all it has to offer, from unrequited love to works of art that don’t fit our self-image. Life is a game of where you can find joy and the high score truly wins.