Monthly Archives: June 2020

  • Shadowlands

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Richard Attenborough (1993)

    When he first met Joy Davidman in 1952, C S Lewis was fifty-three.  He was an eminent scholar, a successful novelist and a renowned lay theologian.  He was also a confirmed bachelor, like his ex-army elder brother, Warren (‘Warnie’), with whom he’d shared a house on the outskirts of Oxford for more than twenty years.  Lewis’s partial autobiography Surprised by Joy was published in 1955.  The book takes its name from a Wordsworth poem, its subtitle is ‘The Shape of My Early Life’ and its narrative culminates in Lewis’s conversion to Christianity in 1931.  The title, in other words, has nothing to do with Joy Davidman, except that the coincidence of its publication and her unexpected, increasing importance in Lewis’s life is impossible to ignore.  He and Joy, who was American, married in 1956.  Seventeen years his junior, she died in 1960, after which Lewis wrote another book:  A Grief Observed was explicitly about Joy’s death and his bereavement.  Shadowlands is an account of this surprising love story.  It’s fitting that Richard Attenborough’s film is at its best when illustrating the relationship’s unlikely and unusual nature.

    For example, the couple marry twice and their first kiss in the film doesn’t happen until the climax to the second wedding ceremony.   The first seals a marriage of convenience.  When she met Lewis – known to family, friends and colleagues as Jack, rather than by either of his birth names (Clive Staples) – Joy was separated from her husband, the American novelist William Lindsay Gresham.  They divorced in 1954 and she came to live in England.  Joy and Jack were good friends by now.  He agreed to enter into a civil marriage contract that would entitle her to stay in the country.  The formalities were completed in an Oxford registry office in April 1956.  When the registrar in Shadowlands asks, ‘Do we have a ring?’ the answer, from bride and groom, is no.  Immediately after the ceremony Jack makes his excuses.  He has to be elsewhere and leaves Joy to go for a drink with Warnie.  A fine romance …  The Lewis brothers continued to live together, Joy in a separate house that Jack found for her in the vicinity.  It was after she was diagnosed with terminal cancer, later in 1956, that Lewis reappraised his feelings and decided he wanted to marry her in a Christian ceremony.  This one is conducted beside Joy’s hospital bed.

    Shadowlands began life as a TV play script entitled I Call it Joy, written by Brian Sibley and Norman Stone.  The project didn’t go ahead on Thames Television as originally planned; when Shadowlands eventually aired on the BBC in December 1985, with Joss Ackland (wonderful) as Lewis and Claire Bloom as Joy, the writing credit went to William Nicholson, with Norman Stone directing.  Nicholson adapted the material for the stage in 1989 then for Attenborough’s big-screen version, starring Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger.  Now in his early seventies, Nicholson has a lengthy list of screenplay credits but Shadowlands, one of his earliest, remains his best work for cinema.  The first scenes show Jack Lewis equally, though differently, in command of seminars and public lectures.  The medievalist asks his students questions about representations of love in the Roman de la Rose.  The Christian apologist tells a packed house of older citizens that God, because He ‘wants us to grow up’, ‘makes us the gift of suffering’.   Nicholson and Richard Attenborough prepare the ground for a man who knows love through literature and engages with theodicy from a public platform, to discover what it’s really like to lose your heart and to suffer.  It’s a virtue of Shadowlands that it doesn’t suggest that Lewis, pre-Joy, is complacent in these matters.  When he learns from experience, it’s a profound upheaval but not a comeuppance.

    The screen announces at the start that ‘This true story takes place in the University City of Oxford 1952’.   There’s probably a disclaimer in the closing titles about adjusting some events and characters for dramatic purposes but, if so, it’s small print beside that bald (and, in the designation of Oxford, rather pompous) opening statement.  Some significant adjustments have been made to the facts of the matter.  Three in particular struck me – the number of Joy Davidman’s children, the location of Lewis’s senior academic appointments and the invented character of Christopher Riley, who regularly disputes with Jack in the pub and at college high table.  It’s worth exploring the rationale for these changes.

    Joy Davidman had two sons from her marriage to Bill Gresham, David and Douglas.  In this film (unlike the television Shadowlands) she has only one, Douglas (Joseph Mazzello).  His being an only child helps intensify Joy’s son’s feelings of isolation, even bewilderment, in alien England and the hospitable but strange environment of The Kilns, the Lewis brothers’ home.  It strengthens too Douglas’s kinship with Jack, who also was only a boy when he lost his mother to cancer – ‘I was your age,’ he tells Douglas.  This is precisely true in the film’s terms:  Lewis was nine when his mother died; Joseph Mazzello was nine when Shadowlands was made.  In reality, Douglas was fourteen when Joy died.  This doesn’t falsify the emotional dynamic but it does draw attention to the lack of detail in the film’s timeframe.  Although Attenborough is deliberately vague as to how far his narrative goes beyond 1952, Douglas’s appearance changes little in the course of the story – you wouldn’t guess that Joy’s death comes nearly eight years later.  It’s understandable that, for the sake of keeping things simple, the University City of Cambridge never gets a look-in.  Lewis moved in 1954 from Magdalen College, Oxford to Magdalene College, Cambridge, as inaugural holder of the Chair of Mediaeval and Renaissance Literature, but still lived at The Kilns.

    Christopher Riley (John Wood) has been described by some reviewers as ‘loosely based’ on J R R Tolkien, Lewis’s longstanding friend and colleague.  That association seems narrowly based:  Tolkien reportedly didn’t think much of books written faster than his own (which came to fruition slowly) and Riley takes Lewis to task for writing too quickly.  In fact, Riley’s double function in Shadowlands, in both its aspects, puts him decidedly at variance with Tolkien.  The latter was a committed Catholic and family man whose marriage lasted fifty-five years and produced four children.  Riley, who sees the soul only as ‘an essentially feminine accessory’ to male intellect, is solitary and celibate.  In a rare quiet exchange between them, Jack, wrestling with the implications of his growing attachment to Joy, asks if Riley is content.  The answer is, ‘I am as I am.  The world is as it is.  My contentment or otherwise has very little to do with it’.  Jack presses – ‘Don’t you ever feel a sense of waste?’ – and Riley bleakly replies, ‘Of course’.  He serves as a duo of academic types, brain-box unbeliever and eccentric egghead solitary.  His counterpoint in Lewis’s Oxford circle is the (also fictional) Harry Harrington (Michael Denison), a widowed Episcopal priest.

    Introduced to Joy at a faculty reception, Riley is characteristically full of clever words and devoid of emotional intelligence.  She leaves him open-mouthed with her parting shot:  ‘Are you trying to be offensive, or just merely stupid?’  Although he doesn’t come close to matching Riley’s insensitivity, the film does well to show Jack’s persisting cluelessness outside the world he’s been accustomed to.  He pays Joy a visit when she and Douglas are living in a London flat, following her divorce and move to England.  Jack is keen to be in her company yet doesn’t seem to know quite what he wants from her:  just as well that Joy, whose British visa won’t be renewed, takes this opportunity to broach the possibility of civil marriage.  (Her proposition is made off-screen but easily inferred from the next scene, when Jack informs his brother.)  Not long before Joy’s death, she and the notoriously untravelled Lewis go to stay in Herefordshire.  He’s bewildered by hotel room service – both the concept and the use of a telephone to ask for it.

    I’d never seen this film before.  I gave it a miss on its original release largely because I thought highly of the BBC Shadowlands and that turning it into a prestige picture, with higher-profile leads and a sizeable budget, was unnecessary and vexing.  Attenborough’s version does have its inflated side.  It’s a bit overlong (135 minutes, compared with the 90-minute TV film):  some of the excess comes from taking time to show off the Oxford locations and gatherings, and photogenic rural locations, without making these visually interesting.  No complaints about the star casting, though.   Anthony Hopkins had struck me as too charismatic for the physically unremarkable C S Lewis but he’s fully convincing.  Without obvious cosmetic aids but with good touches like a dog-eared shirt collar, Hopkins looks right and thoroughly inhabits the role.  Delicate hand movements express Jack’s initially timid fondness for Joy and Douglas.  He starts a second farewell wave to Joy’s departing car, then thinks better of it and drops his hand as if he never meant to raise it in the first place.  He nearly gives Douglas an encouraging pat on the shoulder.  At the same time, Hopkins gets Lewis’s intellectual combativeness.

    Debra Winger, who partners Hopkins most effectively, has this quality too.  The relationship between Lewis and Joy Davidman, in its early stages, was a meeting of minds that didn’t exclude differences of opinion.  Winger is just the right actress to realise on screen a lively intelligence.  She shows you what attracts and disturbs Jack about the extraordinary Joy (Jewish by birth, Christian by decision, atheist and Communist in the meantime, self-confessed ‘Anglomaniac’).  When Joy and Douglas spend their first Christmas at The Kilns the boy wants to phone his father in America; his mother says no; the disagreement – and what the disagreement is about – darkens the atmosphere.  After putting Douglas to bed that evening, Joy comes downstairs to carry on talking with Jack.  She tries to brighten up but can’t shake off the effects of what happened earlier.  Debra Winger has an exceptional ability to physicalise a character’s change of mood, completely but without histrionics.  This is a brilliant example.

    The film’s most emotionally powerful scene, however, comes not between the two leads but after Joy’s death – a conversation between Jack and Douglas.  You’ll need a stiff upper lip if you want to resist sharing in the tears shed by Anthony Hopkins and Joseph Mazzello, who’s excellent throughout.  (Mazzello has continued to get work in the twenty-odd years since this film but without making a big impression.  A friend who’d seen Shadowlands reminded me that he turned up recently as John Deacon in Bohemian Rhapsody.)  As Warnie Lewis, Edward Hardwicke is good enough to make you wish Attenborough had brought out even more strongly than he does the domestic status quo at The Kilns before Joy appears on the scene.  Hardwicke subtly conveys Warnie’s loyalty to his brother, discomfort with how things are changing, and gradual warming to Joy.   You sense Warnie keeps hoping that things will revert to how they used to be.  A vain hope:  by the time Joy falls ill, Jack’s world is transformed.  By then, though, Warnie’s feelings about her have altered too.

    A subplot involving a chippy, bloody-minded English student called Whistler (James Frain) is curious and, in terms of what difference it makes to the film as a whole, another contributor to its overlength.  In one testy exchange with Lewis, Whistler quotes the belief of his father, a village schoolmaster, that ‘We read to know we’re not alone’.  This sticks in Lewis’s mind and is repeated in two subsequent meetings with Whistler, the second a chance one on a train, soon after Joy’s death (and, it transpires, the death of Whistler’s father).   On this occasion, Lewis muses that ‘Some people would say we love to know we’re not alone – would you?’  Whistler replies, ‘Well, if you mean falling in love, I haven’t, really.  I mean, I probably know more about love from books than from personal experience’.   These words tie up a central theme of Shadowlands a bit too neatly, and Whistler’s purpose in the story seems limited to delivering his father’s adage, for repetition and recasting by Lewis.  Even so, I was held by the Whistler scenes:  James Frain left me wanting this character to be developed more than he is.

    When Joy first brings him to The Kilns, Narnia fan Douglas is overawed to meet Lewis.  Three of the series had been published (in Britain, at any rate) by the end of 1952 but the film mentions only The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and even these references are few.  Two other imaginative locations are more prominent, and coalesce.  The title derives from, as Jack explains, one of his stories, which posits that ‘We live in the shadowlands.  The sun is always shining somewhere else, around a bend in the road, over the brow of a hill’.   This echoes what he says when Joy first comments on a painting that hangs in The Kilns:  ‘It was on our nursery wall when I was a child.  I didn’t know it was a real place then.  I used to think it was a view of heaven … that one day I’d come round a bend in the road, or over the brow of a hill, and there it would be’.  The painting is actually a representation of the ‘Golden Valley’ in Herefordshire – where Jack and Joy go on their visit shortly before her final decline and where, in the film’s final shot, he returns with Douglas.

    Once Jack and Joy are properly married, the film almost inevitably loses some of its distinctiveness, fits more into the mould of terminal-illness love story.  What keeps the story out of the ordinary is the increasing challenge to Lewis’s religious faith posed by Joy’s physical pain and mental distress, and his own anguish.  The spiritual crisis is dramatised in very different registers.  Harrington’s reassurance to Jack that ‘We see so little here – we’re not the creator’ prompts a vehement response, cathartic for the viewer as well as for Jack:

    ‘No, we’re the creatures, aren’t we?  We’re the rats in the cosmic laboratory.   I’ve no doubt the experiment is for our own good, but it still makes God the vivisectionist, doesn’t it?’

    What’s unsaid has impact, too.  In an earlier exchange with Harrington, Jack explains that he prays not so that God will answer his prayers but because:

    ‘… I can’t help myself.  I pray because I’m helpless.  I pray because … I pray because the need flows out of me all the time, waking and sleeping.  It doesn’t change God.  It changes me.’

    These words are heard again in the closing stages – inside your head.  Richard Attenborough and Anthony Hopkins suggest life and death with Joy have also changed Lewis.  He’s like a man who has been badly hurt by a close friend but is ‘grown up’ enough not to sever relations.  He may not have lost his faith.  You nevertheless suspect he has less to say to God now.

    10 June 2020

  • A Rainy Day in New York

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Woody Allen (2019)

    The main characters in Woody Allen’s forty-eighth cinema feature are college students.  The film’s title makes clear where it takes place.  Café Society (2016), number forty-six in the Allen canon, also had young leads and New York (as well as Hollywood) locale but the story was set in the 1930s.  Although A Rainy Day in New York is meant to be happening in the present day, the modernity is quite artificial.  When the protagonist, played by twenty-one-year-old Timothée Chalamet, talks about the NYC places, moods and weather that he loves, he’s speaking not for himself but for the octogenarian who supplies his lines.  The young man is a student at (fictional) Yardley College, a small liberal arts institution in upstate New York, but feels more at home in the city – in, say, a dimly lit bar where the jazz pianist plays standards.  Chalamet’s character plays the piano himself – and poker, it seems profitably.  If he mentions films, they’re likely to be old films.  He’s named for cultural touchstones with strong New York connotations – he’s called Gatsby Welles.

    Gatsby is deliberately retro in a few details, like smoking with a cigarette holder, but these are a pose on the writer-director’s part, too.  Woody Allen doesn’t trouble to work up his hero’s consciously antique side and gives himself away when other youngsters, with no other pretensions to stylish anachronism, also come up with out-of-time remarks.  When Gatsby first runs into Chan (Selena Gomez), the younger sister of one of his former girlfriends, he says it’s hard to believe she’s the little kid of his memory:  Chan asks him not to ‘go all Gigi on me’.  (The title song from Gigi is one of those standards heard playing, on a hotel piano, later in the film.)  Gatsby is just the usual male lead in a Woody Allen movie – that is, Allen’s alter ego.  All that’s striking in this case is the huge age gap between them – which is an obstacle to seeing Gatsby as anything more than a figment of his creator’s nostalgic imagination.  Not only is Gatsby’s conversation replete with references to the past.  On the rare occasions he’s engaging with the present, he sounds like an old man – complaining about ‘damned cell phones’, for example.

    Timothée Chalamet is a distinctive addition to the list of younger actors who’ve played versions of Woody Allen because he’s so temperamentally different from the original.  In Gatsby’s opening voiceover, Chalamet seems to be channelling the traditional hectic tone and phrasing but that impression dissipates once he’s been on screen for a few minutes.  When Gatsby says of New York City, ‘You cannot achieve this level of anxiety, hostility or paranoia anywhere else’, Chalamet’s natural languor makes the remark meaningless:  it’s hard to imagine him achieving a level of anxiety, hostility or paranoia anywhere at all.  His willowy, indolent presence is somewhat effective, though.  It chimes with Gatsby’s indifference to the Yardley curriculum (‘I mean, do I really care who wins between Beowulf and Grendel?’).  It also makes for a restful contrast to the over-animation of Gatsby’s girlfriend Ashleigh (Elle Fanning).

    Gatsby and Ashleigh are both at Yardley and both from wealthy families.  Whereas he’s a Manhattanite, she’s from Tucson, Arizona and immoderately excited by their visit to New York – the place and the main purpose of the trip.  Ashleigh has managed to secure an interview with enigmatic film director Roland Pollard (Liev Schreiber), for the college paper.  The meeting takes longer than expected – Pollard claims to be unhappy with his nearly-completed new picture and invites Ashleigh to a private screening – and she doesn’t make it back for lunch with Gatsby.  Their paths don’t cross again until the very end of this very rainy Saturday, back at their hotel.  In the interim, the narrative alternates between their different journeys through the afternoon and evening.

    When the volatile Pollard goes missing, his worried screenwriter Ted Davidoff (Jude Law) goes in search of him, with incredulously bubbly Ashleigh in tow.  While separated from Davidoff, she finds herself face to face with film star and notorious womaniser Francisco Vega (Diego Luna).  They go to a party, where Pollard and Davidoff are also among the guests, then on to a romantic dinner for two.  Local TV news films them leaving the restaurant, from where they head back to Vega’s apartment.  Gatsby, meanwhile, meets Chan again, when they simultaneously open the back doors of the same yellow cab.  They go to Chan’s parents’ apartment (they’re away for the weekend) then on to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where a chance meeting with his aunt and uncle deprives Gatsby of his excuse (absence from New York) for missing a lavish party at his parents’ home that evening.  Piqued by Ashleigh’s disappearance, he takes in a poker game before going to a bar, where he gets into conversation with Terry (Kelly Rohrbach).  She tells him her fee for services is $500.  Gatsby offers her $5000 if she’ll accompany him to his parents’ bash, pretending to be Ashleigh.  Terry isn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth and is soon being introduced to Gatsby’s mother (Cherry Jones) and father (Will Rogers).

    As mentioned in my note on Allen’s previous film, Wonder Wheel (2017), principal photography on A Rainy Day in New York ended on 23 October 2017, the issue date of the New Yorker that featured Ronan Farrow’s Harvey Weinstein exposé.  That piece, in combination with statements by Dylan Farrow in the press and on television, gave renewed impetus to the sexual abuse allegations Dylan had made against Allen in the early 1990s.  At the start of this note, I gave Timothée Chalamet’s age as twenty-one and so it was when A Rainy Day was made – approaching three years ago.  It completed post-production in mid-2018.  By the end of that year, Amazon Studios, who were set to distribute it as the first in their four-picture deal with Allen, dropped the film.  Early in 2019, he filed a breach of contract lawsuit against Amazon, in the light of which US distribution rights were returned to him.  The film opened the Deauville Film Festival in September 2019 and was released in most of continental Europe, as well as Central and South America in the second half of last year.  More recently, it’s been a sizeable box-office hit in South Korea.  As I understand it, A Rainy Day hasn’t had a theatrical release in North America – or in the UK, where it’s just begun streaming on Curzon Home Cinema.

    The long memory that Woody Allen gives Gatsby and Chan in their cultural frame of reference isn’t shared by the young actors playing them.  Chalamet and Selena Gomez were two of four cast members sufficiently unaware of the director’s personal history to sign up for A Rainy Day in mid-2017 but who, once the Dylan Farrow allegations got a new lease of life, were impelled to take action to signal regret at working with Allen.  Griffin Newman (who plays Josh, ex-schoolfellow of Gatsby and now an aspiring filmmaker) tweeted that he would never do so again.  Chalamet, Gomez and Rebecca Hall (who makes a cameo appearance as Ted Davidoff’s angry wife) donated the money they were paid for the film to Time’s Up or other relevant movements.  Hall, who starred in Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona a decade earlier, later explained that ‘I’ve been deliberate in saying that the choice wasn’t making a judgment one way or another. I don’t believe anyone in the public should be judge and jury on a case that is so complex’.  (The ‘choice’ presumably refers to her salary donation rather than joining the cast of A Rainy Day in the first place.)

    It’s tempting to suspect that these four actors, when they decided to work with Woody Allen, weren’t so much ignorant as unconcerned about the Dylan Farrow controversy – and to deride their subsequent reactions as fashion-conscious.  But there’s no doubt either that Allen does a good job in this film of vindicating their professed moral stand:  A Rainy Day isn’t short of dismaying, even brazen misogyny – embodied chiefly in the character and experiences of Ashleigh, who’s not like the nymphets who’ve made the hero’s life worth living in some other Allen movies.  She’s more a rehash of a young woman from a Hollywood era that predates Woody Allen (or his films, at any rate), adjusted to fit into his universe.  Her hyper-self-awareness is a faint echo of Annie Hall; her tendency to get hiccups whenever she’s ‘sexually conflicted’ gives a Woody-Freudian twist to the kind of complaint from which a screwball comedy girl might suffer.  Allen has it in for Ashleigh from the start.  When Gatsby describes her to Chan, the latter is amused and derisive about someone she’s never met – knowing Ashleigh’s an Arizona banker’s daughter is enough – and Chan’s fellow New Yorker Allen seems to share that view.  He’s written Ashleigh as an enthusiastic airhead.  She gushes idiotically to Roland Pollard about her love of movies:  Pollard’s own, though Ashleigh admits she didn’t understand her favourite among them; more generally, ‘all the American classics, especially the European ones’.

    Gatsby, Pollard and Francisco Vega can all forgive Ashleigh for being a twerp because she’s very pretty and nubile (she won ‘Miss Amiability’ in her high-school beauty contest in Tucson – another nail in her coffin).  Even allowing that this film, by a hairsbreadth, is technically pre-#MeToo, Woody Allen is remarkably blasé about powerful older men exploiting their position and a much younger woman (Ashley’s twenty-one but often taken for younger).  Though intoxicated by drink as well as celebrity, she does manage to deflect an invitation from Pollard to come with him to France and be his ‘muse’.  It’s in and after her visit to Francisco Vega’s apartment that Ashleigh gets her comeuppance.  She can’t resist his invitation to sex and they start undressing – at least, she does:  when Vega’s live-in girlfriend (Suki Waterhouse) unexpectedly arrives home, Ashleigh, in her bra and pants, is forced to take refuge in a cupboard.  Instead of handing her dress back to her as he bustles her into hiding, Vega secretes it under a sofa cushion.  That allows Woody Allen – there really is no other way of reading this episode – to extend Elle Fanning’s screen time in a state of undress before Ashleigh finds a mackintosh to cover herself with.  Despite the continuing downpour, she takes her time doing this, as she clambers out of the building via the fire escape.  Reunited with Gatsby, she and he next morning take the horse-drawn cab ride in Central Park they’d intended the previous day.  He quotes lines from Cole Porter’s ‘Night and Day’ that Ashleigh mistakes for Shakespeare.  That’s the last straw:  without further ado, Gatsby politely but decisively ends their relationship.

    I felt sorry for the accomplished Elle Fanning long before Ashleigh’s humiliating last half-hour.  Allen seems to want her to get on the viewer’s nerves, and Fanning does what he wants.  His direction of some others in the cast seems uninvolved.  Jude Law, for example, who hasn’t worked with him before, gives the impression of doing an impression – of a certain type in a Woody Allen picture.  The opening credits are accompanied by Bing Crosby singing ‘I Got Lucky in the Rain’.  From this point onwards, Allen’s priority is to create another love letter to New York.  There’s no denying Vittorio Storaro’s delicate lighting succeeds in romanticising the pluvial locale but the people on the screen aren’t so much instrumental as incidental to Allen’s chief purpose.  Three actors – Selena Gomez, Liev Schreiber and Cherry Jones – nevertheless manage to give their roles freshness and impact.  (Timothée Chalamet does too but only by not being on his character’s or Allen’s wavelength.)

    Gatsby and Chan’s unexpected reunion happens in the street where their mutual friend Josh is shooting a film.  On the spur of the moment, Josh asks Gatsby to do a scene that involves sitting in a car with Chan, and pretending to kiss her.  In between takes, they talk about their past acquaintance and Gatsby’s relationship with Chan’s sister.  Selena Gomez has a strong, very supple voice; she’s especially good in this exchange, as Chan shoots good-humoured, sharp rejoinders to Gatsby.  Liev Schreiber is wittily charismatic as Roland Pollard – it’s no mean feat to bring a semblance of individuality to such a clichéd idea.  Cherry Jones, in a beautiful, unusual golden-yellow evening gown (the costume designer is Suzy Benzinger), has only scene but also the longest monologue in the film.  Gatsby’s mother knows the girl her son brings to the society party can’t be Ashleigh and must be an escort of a different kind.  Mrs Welles knows this because, she tells her son, she used to be that kind of escort too:  it’s how she met Gatsby’s father.  Cherry Jones delivers the speech with such command that the revelation briefly overpowers the film.  Besides, it’s the only surprise that Woody Allen comes up with.  Gatsby has described his mother, to Chan, as a suffocating culture vulture, forever telling him to see this concert or that play.  You might expect Allen to skewer such a woman – especially such a rich woman – as a philistine fraud.  Instead, he suggests Mrs Welles’s professional beginnings make her voracious appetite for the arts admirable.  Unlike Ashleigh, whose not knowing her Cole Porter is an unpardonable sin.

    Chance events that drive a plot, which Allen first latched onto in Match Point (2005), are in evidence again in A Rainy Day.  They bring Gatsby and Chan together in the first place, and the second.  Their third and conclusive meeting, though not exactly planned, realises a conversation they have on the Saturday about the Delacorte Clock in Central Park.  Once Ashleigh has ridden off alone in the horse-drawn cab, rainfall resumes and Chan appears by the clock.  The film ends with her and Gatsby kissing for real.  It’s proof these two young New Yorkers are made for each other and evidence that Woody Allen isn’t above a bit of nativism in his old age.  Because his feelings for his home city are rooted in love, Allen seems oblivious to the unlovely things that are also part of his self-expression.  These come through as if involuntarily in A Rainy Day in New York.  Even Allen’s sympathy for female sex workers seems to be dependent on their cultural aspirations.  When Gatsby meets Terry in the bar she’s initially photographed at a distance that gives her the look of a well-groomed, alluring woman.  Once she’s seen closer up, her overdone ‘classy’ hair and make-up announce her line of work.  By the time she and Gatsby are on the street approaching his parents’ house, Kelly Rohrbach is strutting along in the manner of a cartoon prostitute.  His mother later tells Gatsby she ‘could smell hooker’ the moment Terry entered the room.  Mrs Welles didn’t need to be an ex-escort herself to sniff that out.

    7 June 2020

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