A Rainy Day in New York (2019)

Directed by: Woody Allen | 89 minutes | comedy, romance | Actors: Timothée Chalamet, Elle Fanning, Liev Schreiber, Suzanne Smith, Olivia Boreham-Wing, Ben Warheit, Griffin Newman, Selena Gomez, Gus Birney, Elija Boothe, Will Rogers, Annaleigh Ashford, Jude Law, Frank Marzullo, Kirby Mitchell, Rebecca Hall, Mary Boyer, Ted Neustadt

Despite his advanced age, Woody Allen is still very productive. Since his debut film ‘Take the Money and Run’ (1969), the New York writer and director has made a new film almost every year, with the exception of 1970, 1974, 1976 and 1981. Also in 2018 there was no film by Allen, either. though one was made. ‘A Rainy Day in New York’ (2019) was ‘on the shelf’ for a while because of the controversy surrounding the filmmaker. In the slipstream of the #metoo movement, Dylan, the daughter he adopted with his then-partner Mia Farrow, wrote yet again in a blog about the sexually transgressive behavior of her adoptive father in the 1990s. Allen was acquitted of this at the time, but due to his controversial marriage to another adoptive daughter of Farrow, Soon Yi, his reputation is not very good and that made distributor Amazon Studios decide not to release the film in the United States in any case and to cancel the collaboration. to stop Allen. The filmmaker, in turn, demanded compensation and the case only came to a settlement after nine months. In 2019, the film was picked up by various European distributors and so it happened that ‘A Rainy Day in New York’ was released in a number of European countries, including the Netherlands and Belgium, and some countries in South America and Asia. Incidentally, actors Timothée Chalamet, Selena Gomez, Rebecca Hall and Griffin Newman later distanced themselves from the film and donated their salaries to non-profit organizations that support rape and incest victims.

‘A Rainy Day in New York’ therefore has a rather turbulent history and you can often see that reflected in the end product. However, because Allen plays very ‘safe’ here – read: delivers a blueprint of his suit for 45 previous films – the damage seems to be not too bad as far as all that noise is concerned. Allen’s alter ego is played in this film by the talented Chalamet, who is rightly considered one of the absolute top of his cast of actors. As Gatsby, he is the intellectual and dreamy anti-hero who adores jazz music, 1950s movies and, of course, his hometown of New York. An old soul in a young body. Elle Fanning – another such talent – ​​plays his girlfriend, the naive and otherworldly Ashleigh, who comes from the Arizona countryside and has her eyes set on the big city. Although the two study at a university just outside New York, they still end up in The Big Apple because Ashleigh gets to interview a high brow film director (Liev Schreiber) for the school newspaper and Gatsby misses every opportunity to visit his beloved homeland. Once in New York, the paths of the two soon diverge and as Ashleigh evolves from muse to filmmaker Pollard to sympathetic ear for divorced screenwriter Ted (Jude Law) and star actor Francisco Vega (Diego Luna)’s latest conquest, Gatsby bumps into some old acquaintances from his childhood, including the graceful Shannon (Selena Gomez), the sister of his ex-girlfriend from high school.

Every Woody Allen film is not like the other and the renowned filmmaker makes crappy films just as easily as little masterpieces. Although he has had his best period for a while (that was really the second half of the seventies with, among others, the relationship classics ‘Annie Hall’ (1977) and ‘Manhattan’ (1979)). If you want to generalize, you can say that Allen always makes the same film and that the differences are minimal. ‘A Rainy Day in New York’ is another typical Allen film, although it is becoming less and less credible that today’s actors ladle the woolly, pompous dialogues from his hand. Today’s youth don’t talk like that (has the average young person ever spoken like that, you wonder?). Apart from the contrived dialogues, the story offers little and the film has to rely on precisely that young cast. Even more than Jesse Eisenberg in ‘Cafe Society’ (2016), Timothée Chalamet fits into the straitjacket that is a consequence of Allen’s own personality; he does have something of that exclusive, that intellectual, but also the accompanying neurotic traits, which fit him like a glove. Fanning is also convincing as the equally neurotic Ashleigh, an innocent – ​​almost silly – deer that hops into the big bad outside world and who is lured by influential, powerful men (is Allen holding up a mirror to his ‘own’ media world here?). Also surprising is Selena Gomez, who excels because she knows how to keep her acting small and sober. The fourth important pawn, as in so many Allen films, is the city of New York, to which the filmmaker apparently hasn’t paid enough tribute yet. The city remains something special, of course, but is portrayed here no differently than in other films by Allen.

‘A Rainy Day in New York’ is old wine in new bottles and only manages to surprise because the young protagonists manage to hold their own. But to go along with that, you have to go along with the pretentious and woolly dialogues that are put into their mouths by Allen in their eighties. Not Allen’s best, but one of his better of the tens.