Film review

  • 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

  • Carmen Jones

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Otto Preminger (1954)

    Oscar Hammerstein’s transposition of Georges Bizet’s Carmen has a World War II setting and was first produced on Broadway during the War, in 1943.  In his autobiography Otto Preminger described the stage show as a collection of ‘skits loosely based on the opera’ with music ‘simplified and changed so that the performers who had no operatic training could sing it’.  In bringing the material to the cinema screen a decade later, Preminger wanted to make ‘a dramatic film with music rather than a conventional film musical’; he encouraged the screenwriter Harry Kleiner to draw on Prosper Mérimée’s novella, which was Bizet’s source, as well as the opera’s libretto.  It’s surprising, then, that Preminger, despite casting actors who could sing (Harry Belafonte is perhaps better described as a singer who can act) in the two main roles, had their musical numbers dubbed by opera singers.  Carmen Jones deserves its place in the US National Film Registry of ‘culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant’ films but it’s stylistically confused.  Preminger’s coalition of realistic drama and operatic voices is at the heart of the confusion.

    The opening half-hour, which culminates in the seduction of squeaky-clean army corporal Joe (Belafonte) by sultry bad girl Carmen (Dorothy Dandridge), is the best part of the film.  On an army base somewhere in the American South, where the story begins, Joe is top of the class.  More handsome, ambitious and clean-living than any of his fellow soldiers (he doesn’t drink or smoke), he’s won a place to study as an aircraft pilot, and is due soon to leave for flight school.  His lovingly demure fiancée Cindy Lou (Olga James) comes to visit Joe at the base; the first sign of an impulsive streak in him appears when Joe’s decides he wants to marry her there and then.  That plan is soon thwarted.  When Carmen, who works in a parachute factory on the base, flirts shamelessly with Joe in the canteen, he easily ignores her.  She then starts a catfight with another factory worker.   Sergeant Brown (Brock Peters), who resents Joe, unkindly assigns him to deliver Carmen to the civilian authorities for punishment (and a probable custodial sentence).  That means a road trip of fifty miles with a girl who’s already come on strong to him.

    In the passenger seat of the army jeep, Carmen won’t keep her hands off Joe, though he keeps pushing her away.  When she tries to abscond, that necessitates more close contact between them, as he catches her, binds her hands and feet, and throws her over his shoulder.  You become intensely aware of the physicality of the two stars, especially Dorothy Dandridge.  What the African-American film historian Donald Bogle describes as her ‘wildly uninhibited body movements’ are more stylised than I expected (I’d seen Carmen Jones only once before, getting on for fifty years ago) but they’re no less impressive for that.  The sustained physical contact, even though it’s often antagonistic, makes Joe’s eventual capitulation to Carmen inevitable.  This follows a genuinely erotic moment, when she tells him the belt in his trousers is twisted, removes and straightens it then starts working it back into place.  This first part of Carmen Jones on its own justifies turning Hammerstein’s stage musical into a film.  Although it includes Carmen’s ‘There’s a Café on the Corner’ (Hammerstein’s version of Bizet’s Séguedille), its expressiveness isn’t chiefly dependent on song and dance.  It raises hopes, though they prove to be short-lived, of sufficient substance between the Carmen musical highlights to realise Preminger’s idea of ‘a dramatic film with music’.

    Joe gets up next morning to find a note from Carmen, who says she loves him but can’t face the prospect of jail so is running away.  It’s Joe who ends up inside – in the military stockade – for letting his charge escape.  Once released, he goes to the night club where Carmen now works, arriving shortly after the celebrated prizefighter Husky Miller (Joe Adams) has put in an appearance in the club.   Husky, who makes his big entrance to ‘Stan’ Up an’ Fight’ (the Toreador Song), takes an instant fancy to Carmen.  He orders his sidekicks (Roy Glenn and Nick Stewart) to make sure they get her on a train to Chicago, along with Frankie (Pearl Bailey) and Myrt (Diahann Carroll), Carmen’s friends and co-workers at the club.  The ‘Whizzin’ Away Along de Track’ quintet, in which the other four urge her to join them on the train and Carmen assesses the pros and cons of hooking up with a rich man whom she doesn’t love, is effective – not least because it doesn’t demand power singing and feels closer to a number in ‘a conventional film musical’.  But Carmen Jones struggles once the action switches to Chicago.

    Carmen goes there with Joe, who is now in hiding from the military authorities.  He arrived at the night club determined to make a fresh start; Carmen, angry at the prospect of his leaving her for flight school, threatens to pair off instead with Sergeant Brown, who’s also sniffing around her at the club.   The two men come to blows; Joe comes out on top but knows he’ll face another spell in the stockade – much longer than the first – for assaulting a senior officer.  Joe and Carmen take the same train as Husky’s entourage but not in their company.  When they get to Chicago, they hole up in a rented room.  It’s shabby – noisy too, beside a busy railway line.  Preminger and the cinematographer Sam Leavitt make the brief scenes there claustrophobic but the ‘realism’ (always a relative term in Carmen Jones) that felt central in the road-to-seduction episode is peripheral now.

    Carmen’s abandonment of Joe to become Husky’s mistress and the build-up to Joe’s lethal revenge on her, at the boxing arena where Husky’s big fight is taking place, are bound to be melodramatic.  That wouldn’t be such an issue if Preminger hadn’t, in the earlier stages, leavened the melodrama with a bit of realistic texture.  Once he stops doing so, you wonder why he did so in the first place.  The action turns increasingly stagy – as in a scene when all the main characters – including Cindy Lou, making a last-ditch attempt to save Joe from Carmen and himself – all congregate in a room at Husky’s gym.  Dorothy Dandridge’s singing voice is dubbed by Marilyn Horne, Harry Belafonte’s by LeVern Hutcherson and Joe Adams’s by Marvin Hayes.  This is a bigger problem with Belafonte because his own singing voice is so familiar but in all three cases the operatic sound is wrong.  It not only reinforces the disconnection of the sung and spoken elements of Carmen Jones but conflicts with the vernacular of Oscar Hammerstein’s lyrics.  If the material didn’t need opera-trained voices in the theatre, why were they required in a medium where the acting was likely more naturalistic than on the Broadway stage?

    It’s no coincidence that Pearl Bailey, who does her own singing, delivers the film’s most enjoyable and satisfying performance:  her ‘Beat Out Dat Rhythm on a Drum’ (the Flower Song) in the night club is easily the musical highlight.  The animalistic energy of the ‘Rhythm on a Drum’ dancers is the peak of Herbert Ross’s choreography, too.  I’m also guessing that Olga James did her own singing as Cindy Lou:  this bobby-soxed wronged ingénue is a drag but James makes her a coherent drag.  In contrast, the dubbing has a jarring effect even in a small role like that of Myrt:  Diahann Carroll, in her big-screen debut, is lip-syncing to the high-pitched voice of Bernice Peterson.

    Dorothy Dandridge became the first actor of colour to be nominated for a lead acting Oscar for her performance in Carmen Jones.  (Hattie McDaniel had won, and Esther Waters had been nominated, as Best Supporting Actress.  The first male Oscar nominee of colour was Sidney Poitier for The Defiant Ones, four years after Carmen Jones.)  Dandridge has extraordinary presence throughout although her classiness pays diminishing dividends.  The tension between the actress’s sexy elegance and the shameless hussy her character is meant to be is compelling.  Dandridge isn’t so effective, though, when it comes to dramatising Carmen’s supposedly falling in love for the first time or, when she forsakes Joe for the material perks of life with Husky, what drives her to do so.  Dorothy Dandridge’s Carmen is enduringly famous for unhappy off-screen reasons as well as for its intrinsic quality and distinctiveness.  Her own short life, like the fate of the character that made her a star, reads like a ‘tragic mulatto’ story.

    Harry Belafonte’s acting is also more satisfying in the early stages.  He’s relaxed and charismatic in the scenes at the base and makes Joe’s infatuation with Carmen credible.  He’s less comfortable as the driven-to-distraction version of Joe in the film’s second half.  Although only thirty at the time, Joe Adams (who became Ray Charles’s manager) looks older; he’s a strong presence but on the mature side for an aspiring boxer (Husky is known as ‘the Coming Champ’).   Brock Peters, also appearing in his first film, has both singing and non-singing duties:  he dubs the singing voice of Roy Glenn as well as playing Sergeant Brown.  I liked Peters more as this unsympathetic character than in his better-known victim and sad nice guy roles in To Kill a Mockingbird and The L-Shaped Room respectively.

    Carmen Jones chiefly merits inclusion in the National Film Registry pantheon because it’s a big (CinemaScope) 1950s musical with an all-black cast that did well at the box office.  (Preminger went on to make a film of Porgy and Bess later in the decade, with Dorothy Dandridge but without repeating the commercial success of this earlier collaboration.)   The fact that Oscar Hammerstein’s musical was first staged on Broadway in the same year that Hollywood made a very different all-black musical – Vincente Minnelli’s Cabin in the Sky – underlines the conceptual originality of Carmen Jones.  Minnelli’s film is a better crafted piece of cinema but the characters in Cabin in the Sky are mostly infantilised or insultingly over-simplified.  The dramatis personae of Carmen Jones may be broadly drawn but at least the strongest of them are adults fighting with their feelings and loyalties.  There are aspects of the production that stick in the craw – like the fact that Dorothy Dandridge’s singing voice was supplied by a white woman.  But even that was some kind of progress from casting a white actress as Pinky’s light-skinned heroine-of-colour, five years earlier.

    4 June 2020

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