Analysis Of Cafe Society By Woody Allen

Woody Allen is 80. Time is finite and he knows it. Every day the industrious same: wake, work, weights, treadmill, work, clarinet, work, supper, TV, sleep. Except today and tomorrow and Thursday, when he’ll do something futile.

“I never thought there was any point doing press,” he says. “I don’t think anybody ever reads an interview and says: ‘Hey, I want to see that movie!’” He smiles benignly, tip-to-toe in peanut-butter beige. Allen no longer reads anything about himself (except, maybe, one article, of which more later). This is the boring bit of film-making. This and the gags of the financiers.

Yet for someone who feels that way, he sure pulls the hours. At Cannes, he even carried on regardless of the publication of a piece by his son,
He seems stumped. “The odds are bigger than astronomical. You’d have a better chance of shuffling a deck of cards and naming them all in row. I’ve never got more than two numbers. I’d probably shoot myself if I got five and missed by one. That would really be a killer – but I don’t have that problem.”
Allen on the set of Café Society with Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart. Photograph: Steve Sands/GC Images

Don’t be fooled by Café Society’s tourist-bait take on Tinseltown. Don’t get blinded by its goggle-eyes at the glimpse of bling. It may look lush, but a good 60% of that rose-tint is jaundice. The movie biz, says someone, is “boring, nasty, dog-eat-dog”. Hollywood, remarks Allen’s narrator, is “a town run on ego” – plain and simple, no leavening punchline.

But then, he says today, cheerfully spooling out the doominess, where isn’t? “I’m sure every business is full of phonies and people that don’t return phone calls and play the big shot. I’m sure it exists on Wall Street and in London and Rome, but Hollywood always gets the rap because there it’s so obvious. You’re dealing with one diva after
“Hopefully, the wave will ebb and people will realise that’s not the problem and focus more on what the problems are. But the world is full of intolerance and prejudice. Freud said there would always be antisemitism because people are a sorry lot. And they are a sorry lot.” He twinkles through the specs, left eye a little awry these days, like a Woody Allen action doll that’s been dropped. He’s tiny. Some stars are shorter than you expect; he seems, literally, still inside the TV.
Allen has long been resigned to life’s deep bleakness. He is the wise-cracking nihilist, jokes provoked by the need not to leap. Yet some cynicism seems to be distilling. While previous films left characters wrestling guilt, this last one metes out justice with a wallop. When he talks about the world being “full of terrified people walking round suffering tremendously”, it carries more charge than the old patter.

I suggest he’s getting tougher as he gets older. He chuckles and says the opposite is true. “I don’t believe in the Nietzschean notion that what doesn’t destroy you makes you stronger. You see these soldiers come back with PTSD; they’ve been to war and seen death and experienced these existential crises one after the other. There are traumas in life that weaken us for the future. And that’s what’s happened to me. The various slings and arrows of life have not strengthened me. I think I’m weaker. I think there are things I couldn’t take now that I would have been able to take when