To say that Woody Allen is taking a long retirement from cinema would be a gross understatement.

He doesn't say goodbye at all.

He still makes a film almost every year, and a major work like Match Point or Blue Jasmine still comes out every few years.

Except that the gaps between the match points have recently become significantly larger.

In the meantime, we may accompany Woody Allen on his cinematographic tour of Europe and America: London, Barcelona, ​​Paris, Rome, the Côte d'Azur, San Francisco, Coney Island.

Recently, one hears, he is said to have pitched his director's tent again near the Louvre.

Andrew Kilb

Feature correspondent in Berlin.

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In the summer of 2019, however, Allen was filming in San Sebastián in northern Spain's Basque Country.

The resulting film opened the film festival there the following year, which was inevitable given that it is set at that festival.

If you remember that the main character of the story is a film lecturer from New York, you get an idea of ​​the liberties that Woody Allen now allows himself in the cinema.

Woody Allen films have always been set in Woody Allen territory, but as their geographic scope expands, his fictions seem to shrink more and more about their creator.

A film scholar at a film festival: One could almost say that the story tells itself.

The ephemera of cinema operations

But only almost.

Because when Mort Rifkin (Wallace Shawn) arrives with his wife in San Sebastián, he has actually already lost.

Sue (Gina Gershon) is the press agent for the new film by French director Philippe (Louis Garrel), but she is even more responsible for the director herself. Her husband, who smells the fraud but doesn't see it, takes refuge in Sottisen, city walks and chest pains .

His complaints lead him to the doctor Joanna (Elena Anaya), who is not only beautiful but also unhappy because her husband, a visual artist (Sergi López), torments her with his jealousy and his affairs.

The betrayed and the betrayed get together, go to the weekly market, take the fishing boat and talk about the things in life, but a remnant of narrative instinct keeps their director from

to knit a romance out of the soul flirt.

Or maybe it's just the idea of ​​having to show Wallace Shawn and Elena Anaya in a love scene.

Because in "Rifkin's Festival" every role is cast strictly according to type, the wrinkled Mort as well as the arrogant handsome Philippe, the voluptuous and slightly faded Sue as well as the warm-hearted suffering Joanna, and so every character remains trapped in their stereotype.

Her inner workings don't rise an inch above what you need to know about those involved in a middle-class marriage that is falling apart or the ephemera of cinema operations.

It's as if the director is telling us that this time the story doesn't really matter.

But what then?

Don't forget the cancer screening!

To film history.

When Mort Rifkin closes his eyes to think about his doctor or to escape a boring festival dinner for brief moments, he is dreaming in images from cinema classics.

He then sees his wife and the beautiful Joanna in her nightgown float through the hotel bedroom to embrace in a shot taken from Ingmar Bergman's Persona.

Or Mort's childhood resurfaces in the black-and-white shimmer of Citizen Kane, only the famous carriage bears the name of his first love: Rose Budnick.

In the weakest of these three-minute homages, the film has guests running into the invisible wall of Buñuel's The Crucifying Angel at the festival director's dinner.

In the best, because most disrespectful, he again quotes Bergman, this time the “Seventh Seal”.

On the beach, Rifkin meets Death, who, as always, has his chess game with him and is played with cheerful sarcasm by Christoph Waltz.

As the man in black is about to say goodbye after the game, Rifkin asks when he will see him again.

That depends, says Waltz, on whether he eats enough fruit and vegetables and is wary of harmful fatty acids.

He should also not forget the annual cancer check-up.

Such is the humor of this film, and that gallows humor has always been a charm of Woody Allen's cinema.

Except that the nonchalance with which he once again tells of love affairs, betrayal and the suffering of aging men has something increasingly unworldly and desperate about it.

"These fragments I have shored against my ruins", it says at the end of TS Eliot's "Wüstem Land".

Perhaps the fact that Woody Allen has to use his cinema gods to pull off a mediocre plot in front of a picturesque backdrop is a sign that the farewell is getting closer.