Film Overview
A film-obsessed former professor accompanies his publicist wife to the San Sebastián Film Festival and begins interpreting his failing marriage, artistic frustration and unexpected attraction to a Spanish doctor through the classic European films that have shaped his life.
Wallace Shawn plays Mort Rifkin, a retired film professor struggling to write a novel capable of meeting the impossible artistic standard he has set for himself.
Gina Gershon plays his wife Sue, a film publicist attending the festival with Philippe, played by Louis Garrel, a fashionable young French director whose latest film is receiving enormous attention.
Mort suspects Sue’s enthusiasm for Philippe has become more than professional. His irritation is intensified by his conviction that Philippe’s acclaimed work is shallow beside the European masters Mort reveres.
A visit to a doctor introduces Mort to Jo Rojas, played by Elena Anaya. Jo is married to volatile painter Paco, played by Sergi López, and her own dissatisfaction creates an immediate connection with Mort.
Vittorio Storaro photographs San Sebastián in rich colour while Mort’s dreams and cinematic fantasies move into black and white, invoking the filmmakers who formed his worldview: Bergman, Fellini, Godard, Truffaut and Buñuel.
Watch Rifkin’s Festival
My Review
A life viewed through the films that taught Mort how life ought to look
Rifkin’s Festival is one of Woody Allen’s most openly cinephile films, built around a character who has spent so long watching great European cinema that ordinary life keeps disappointing him by comparison.
Mort does not simply love Bergman, Fellini, Truffaut, Godard and Buñuel. He has allowed their films to establish the standard against which reality is judged.
That is an impossible arrangement.
A marriage rarely has Storaro lighting, a perfect final scene and ninety minutes in which every emotional detail contributes to the theme.
Mort has watched so many masterpieces that ordinary life has begun to look badly directed.
Wallace Shawn is inspired casting because Mort’s insecurity sits beside genuine intelligence. He knows cinema deeply and can articulate exactly why he thinks Philippe’s fashionable film is inferior to the work he values.
The difficulty is that knowledge has hardened into judgement.
Mort dismisses contemporary success partly because he believes the culture has lost standards and partly because Philippe has the professional confidence and romantic proximity Mort currently lacks.
Criticism becomes wonderfully difficult to separate from jealousy.
Gina Gershon’s Sue is far less interested in Mort’s hierarchy of cinematic greatness. She works in the actual film business and understands the practical importance of promoting the filmmaker whose work everybody currently wants to discuss.
Mort interprets that enthusiasm as another sign that both cinema and marriage have deteriorated.
Sue sees a husband who has spent years trying to write something worthy of the masters and has mostly produced frustration.
Their conflict is therefore about Philippe, but it is also about Mort’s relationship with achievement.
Mort complains that Philippe has been praised for a mediocre film. The more painful fact is that Philippe finished one.
Elena Anaya brings a welcome calm as Jo. She and Mort connect through conversation rather than instant romantic fantasy.
Jo’s marriage to Paco is difficult in a completely different way. Sergi López makes the painter intense, jealous and capable of turning artistic temperament into domestic exhaustion.
Mort sees in Jo the possibility that another emotionally and intellectually compatible person exists.
Whether that possibility can become a life is almost less important than the fact that meeting her reawakens him.
The dream sequences are the film’s real delight. Mort’s anxiety repeatedly escapes reality and reconstructs itself through the cinema he reveres.
The black-and-white imagery creates an immediate separation from the glowing colour of San Sebastián.
Bergman becomes particularly important because Mort’s central questions are exactly the kind that Bergman spent decades asking: death, meaning, belief, marriage and the terror that none of the answers may be satisfactory.
Christoph Waltz appearing as Death makes that influence wonderfully literal.
Mort has spent his life studying films about death and meaning. Naturally, when Death finally appears, Mort wants to discuss cinema.
Storaro’s decision to separate the festival reality in colour from Mort’s cinematic interior life in black and white is exactly right.
San Sebastián becomes incredibly vivid: sea, architecture, food, festival banners and warm evening light.
The dreams simplify into monochrome because Mort’s idea of serious art was formed partly by black-and-white European cinema.
The result is one of the clearest visual representations of a character’s inner life in Allen’s later work.
Stéphane Wrembel’s music gives the film another strong connection to cinema. His guitar-led original material sits beside Nino Rota, Georges Delerue, Francis Lai and original music taken from films associated with Bergman.
The soundtrack therefore functions almost like Mort’s private film library.
Wrembel, who had already provided music for Midnight in Paris, gives the real-world San Sebastián story a relaxed melodic identity while the classic film references pull Mort backwards into the cinema of his youth.
Music and memory become inseparable.
The soundtrack keeps moving between the movie Mort is living and the movies he would rather be living in.
San Sebastián is photographed with enormous affection. The Kursaal, Victoria Eugenia Theatre, La Concha and the city’s waterfront create a real festival environment rather than a generic European backdrop.
That matters because Mort has arrived at a place where everybody else is celebrating cinema while he is privately mourning the cinema he thinks has disappeared.
The city keeps contradicting his pessimism by being beautiful, social and alive.
Jo performs a similar function emotionally.
The film ultimately becomes gentler than Mort. His marriage may be ending and his novel may never become a masterpiece, but neither fact requires life itself to become worthless.
Meeting Jo reminds him that enthusiasm remains possible.
The European classics he loves do not need to be replaced by his own great novel in order to retain their value.
Perhaps loving the films was always enough.
Mort arrives in San Sebastián believing he has failed to make great art. He leaves having remembered that loving great art is also a way of living.
For somebody as interested in film history as I am, this is naturally one of the later Allen films with a particular appeal.
The references are not hidden. The whole point is that Mort sees his life through them.
Wallace Shawn makes the character funny without losing his sadness, Anaya gives the film warmth, and Storaro turns San Sebastián into a city that looks completely capable of repairing a little of Mort’s pessimism.
It is a film about cinema made by somebody who clearly still enjoys the fact that films can alter the way reality looks.
Cast and Characters
Wallace Shawn
A former film professor and blocked novelist whose standards have been shaped by the European cinema he reveres.
Elena Anaya
A doctor Mort meets in San Sebastián whose intelligence and unhappiness in her own marriage create an immediate connection.
Gina Gershon
Mort’s publicist wife, increasingly absorbed in the career and personality of her filmmaker client Philippe.
Louis Garrel
A fashionable young French filmmaker receiving enormous attention at the festival and almost none of Mort’s respect.
Sergi López
Jo’s passionate and volatile painter husband, whose behaviour contributes to her own dissatisfaction.
Christoph Waltz
Mort’s cinematic imagination eventually gives mortality a face worthy of one of the classic European films he has spent his life studying.
Stéphane Wrembel scores a film already haunted by the history of cinema
Wrembel’s newly composed music sits beside Nino Rota, Georges Delerue, Francis Lai and music associated with Bergman’s films.
Rifkin’s Festival
Wrembel’s title piece gives Mort’s real-world journey through San Sebastián a melodic identity distinct from the classic film music that enters through his memories and dreams.
Rota, Delerue, Lai and Bergman enter Mort’s private film festival
The film uses existing soundtrack music associated with directors Mort reveres, including Federico Fellini and Ingmar Bergman.
Francis Lai and Georges Delerue bring French cinema into the same musical conversation.
Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams
Wrembel and Aurora Nealand perform a standard whose title could almost function as Mort’s description of cinema itself.
La passerella di addio
Rota’s music directly invokes the Fellini world that occupies such an important place in Mort’s cinematic imagination.
Un homme et une femme
The famous French film theme connects romance and movie memory in a story where Mort continually experiences one through the other.
Persona & The Seventh Seal
Music from Bergman’s cinema enters Mort’s dreams as he turns his own anxieties into black-and-white European art-film imagery.
Locations
San Sebastián is both real city and cinematic ideal, with the production using genuine festival landmarks throughout the story.
Kursaal
The iconic waterfront festival venue is used as part of the fictionalised version of the San Sebastián International Film Festival.
Victoria Eugenia Theatre
The historic theatre provides another genuine festival location incorporated into Mort and Sue’s stay.
La Concha
The famous bay and beach form much of the film’s beautiful coastal geography.
Hotel María Cristina
The luxury hotel belongs naturally to the international film-festival world surrounding Sue and Philippe.
Mirador de Ulía
The elevated viewpoint provides one of the film’s striking evening locations above the city.
Zumaia & Pasajes
The production moved beyond the city itself to coastal locations elsewhere in Gipuzkoa.
Awards and Recognition
Opening Film
Rifkin’s Festival opened the 68th San Sebastián International Film Festival in 2020.
Out of Competition
The film was presented in the Official Selection outside competition.
Colour and Black & White
Storaro deliberately separates Mort’s festival reality in colour from his classic-film-inspired interior world in black and white.
A Tribute to European Film
Bergman, Fellini, Godard, Truffaut and Buñuel form the explicit cinematic reference points shaping Mort’s imagination.
Original Music
Wrembel returned to Allen’s work with a newly composed score alongside the film’s classic-cinema soundtrack references.
A Film About Loving Films
Few Allen features make his affection for European cinema as explicit or as central to the protagonist’s emotional life.