Quartile rating: 6/10 · 1 rating
The story of a married American couple who go to the San Sebastian Film Festival. They get caught up in the magic of the festival, the beauty and charm of Spain and the fantasy of movies. She has an affair with a brilliant French movie director, and he falls in love with a beautiful Spanish woman who lives there.
Rifkin's Festival is a late-period Woody Allen effort that leans heavily on familiar Allen tropes—neurotic intellectual, failing marriage, European backdrop, cinephile references—without adding much new. The plot is thin and episodic, following predictable romantic entanglements at a film festival, with dream sequences homaging classic European art cinema (Bergman, Fellini, Godard) that feel more like clever pastiche than genuine insight. The acting is serviceable but the ensemble isn't given particularly rich material. San Sebastián is beautifully rendered and the cinematography is competent, capturing the city's charm adequately. The film is deeply derivative of Allen's own earlier, better work and offers little narrative or thematic resolution in its ending. Novelty suffers most: this is well-trodden Allen territory without the wit or emotional depth of his peak output.