The closing ceremony of the Karlovy Vary festival will include a screening of the new Woody Allen’s film Café Society.
After a trilogy set in European capitals that began with Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), this year Allen pays a visit to 1930s Hollywood and New York, which he presents in all their intrinsic beauty and baseness.
Bobby leaves his ever-belligerent Jewish family and heads to Hollywood to learn about the world. Mesmerized by the dazzling glamour of movie stars and, above all, by secretary Vonnie’s considerable charms, he experiences moments of both giddy happiness and bitter disappointment. He returns to his native New York with a broken heart – and newly-acquired savviness – to run an establishment renowned for its sinful chic. But then, when it finally seems that things are going his way, fate reshuffles the deck… Renowned DOP Vittorio Storaro’s rich lensing brings heft to the golden era of Hollywood and the heyday of the New York Mob in an intricate labyrinth of luxury apartment suites and menacingly-darkened hideaways. Jesse Eisenberg’s transformation from a neurotic underling into a convivial man about town enables Allen to present an affectionately nostalgic story of thwarted love with all his trademarks: wonderful music, polished one-liners, and debacles from which there is no escape – all set against the romantic machinations of muddled protagonists forced to pay for destiny’s malicious tricks.
