Woody Allen in verve, and how! This is the New York we love, that of piano bars, walks in Central Park, yellow taxis and wet cobblestones. These are the characters we adore, lovers lost in failed dates, tortured artists, gently unfaithful women, and a escort girl beautiful. For this 53rd opus, Woody Allen lets go of his little world during a rainy weekend – what could be more romantic? – following Gatsby (Timothée Chalamet), a student honing his skills on the green carpet rather than working his exams at Yardley, a chic provincial college where “one mononucleosis is worth two units of value”.
Concentrated Woody Allen
Delighted to spend two lovely days in Manhattan with his fiancée Ashleigh (Elle Fanning), who has to interview a depressed director (“Who influenced him the most on love, Denis de Rougemont or Ortega y Gasset? »), Gatsby organizes the sentimental getaway. Of course, fate – and Woody Allen – disrupts everything. While Ashleigh swoons in admiration for the afflicted filmmaker (“You are between Renoir and Kurosawa, the European filmmakers”) who thinks only of flirting with her, Gatsby buys himself a cigarette holder, meets a moron (who “medicine preparation in Grenada, thanks to a plunger”), attends a shooting, realizes that his fiancée is flirting with the fifty-year-old artist (“Why are older men so attractive to women? How sexy is memory loss? »)…
In short, nothing goes as planned, and it’s delicious. The dialogues fuse, people launch barbed reflections ( “She’s from Arizona?” What are you talking about, cactus? » ), museums are a pretext for unexpected encounters, and it all ends with Ashleigh naked under a raincoat and Gatsby being scolded by his mother during a posh party. It’s the kind of film you savor every minute, like “Annie Hall”, “Radio Days”, “Manhattan” or “Gunshots on Broadway”. This tender humor, these wavering feelings, this waltz of misunderstandings, it’s concentrated Woody Allen, with a touch of magical absurdity and the marvelous light of Vittorio Storaro (the director of photography of “Last Tango in Paris”). Basically, our Woody is the son of Chekhov and Offenbach. Or Bix Beiderbecke and Marivaux. We have already seen the film twice. And we will see him again, delighted with this happiness of cinema.
Thursday, February 16 at 9:55 p.m. on OCS Max. American comedy by Woody Allen (2019). With Timothée Chalamet, Elle Fanning, Selena Gomez. 1h33. (Multicast and On Demand).
