Café Society | Little White Lies

Café Soci­ety

30 Aug 2016 / Released: 02 Sep 2016

A woman with auburn hair, wearing a white blouse, gazes intently at the camera against a blurred natural backdrop.
A woman with auburn hair, wearing a white blouse, gazes intently at the camera against a blurred natural backdrop.
4

Anticipation.

It’s that time of year again...

3

Enjoyment.

Ponderous and light, though it comes into its own with the heartening climax.

3

In Retrospect.

Bittersweet period Woody. Fine.

Kris­ten Stew­art and Jesse Eisen­berg lay on the old-school charm in Woody Allen’s Gold­en Age Hol­ly­wood satire.

What if, at that cru­cial junc­ture in our lives, we had cho­sen one path instead of anoth­er? In movies, that alter­na­tive real­i­ty can be lived vic­ar­i­ous­ly, and with­out expe­ri­enc­ing the messy fall­out. The cheer­ful­ly archa­ic Café́ Soci­ety pairs up Kris­ten Stew­art and Jesse Eisen­berg as low-lev­el func­tionar­ies in 1930s Hol­ly­wood, and then fol­lows on from the moment where their bur­geon­ing romance sud­den­ly, cru­el­ly falls to pieces. The plot takes the form of a figure‑8 pat­tern, two strands loop­ing out­wards, cross­ing in the mid­dle and then meet­ing at the (heart­break­ing) climax.

As with much late Woody Allen, the philo­soph­i­cal idea nes­tled at the core of this sweet comedic runaround is far more inter­est­ing than the way in which it is expressed. Sure, he knows how to throw togeth­er a super­fi­cial­ly enjoy­able movie, one that rat­tles along and cov­ers all the required bases: every scene begins and ends at the point it should; jokes linger on for no longer than they are need­ed; super­flu­ous infor­ma­tion is the dev­il. Yet some­times you can see, hear and feel the utter lack of joy he takes in mak­ing that jour­ney from point A to point B. A nar­ra­tion which he intones him­self intro­duces the audi­ence to the Tin­sel­town jet set. It is so rote in its obser­va­tions that you’d be for­giv­en for think­ing he’d pinched it from his own Radio Days, Zelig or The Pur­ple Rose of Cairo.

There’s no such slack­ness from vet­er­an cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Vit­toro Storaro, who frames the gaudy, gild­ed stuc­co palaces of the mon­eyed west coast with a ghost­ly pre­ci­sion, locat­ing clean lines in a daz­zling mess of high style. With its cen­tral theme of lost beau­ty and unful­filled desire, the film coun­ter­points the char­ac­ters mu ed depres­sion with lus­trous décor and elab­o­rate light­ing schemes. It’s designed like a gold­en nugget, with thick shafts of light shim­mer­ing through win­dow blinds, and inte­ri­or sur­faces made to glim­mer allur­ing­ly. Still, mid-table Woody is bet­ter than the A‑game of most oth­er jour­ney­man hacks.

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