Cafe Society Analysis

Cafe Society

Written & Directed by: Woody Allen

Starring: Jesse Eisenberg, Kristen Stewart

Cinematography: Vittorio Storaro

Opened the Cannes Film Festival 2016

Bobby Dorfman enters the Hollywood industry in 1930s to find a job where his uncle Phil Stern is a big shot - Phil asks his secretary Vonnie to show him the city and ooops! It's a Woody Allen film and it actually feels like a text, where we hear his voice over - every line that is there in the film, feels so literary, poetic and yet so banal and absurd. The way he introduces every character, it has nothing to do with the character's flaw, need and want - every character is so layered that the way he introduces every character, is about them as being a part of his world. Vonnie, when she falls in love with Bobby and when Phil Stern asks to marry him - she goes and marries him and it's the absurdity of life. The way Vonnie says what she hates about the glamour of the city and changes into them by the end, shows us how people change and it hits hard. The ending is beautiful, where it's not tragic but it keeps them and us wondering how things would've been if their choices were different.

The plot is so simplistic, about two men who fall in love with one girl - that if you tell this to anyone, they'd be so off already but the amount of layering that happens with the plot. One is a powerful movie shot, another is trying to find jobs in the same industry. One is married, one is young - one promises a stable future, one doesn't and it's not only her choice. It's also about how this complication is revealed to us, and all the parties involved, as Hitchcock says that drama comes out of people talking on a table with a bomb underneath which we, the audience knows can blow anytime.

There are a lot of other characters in this film, I wonder how Woody Allen writes these many layered characters, an intellect, a gangster - he introduces them with their archetypes itself, because of the way people look at them. All of them combined, it creates a Woody Allen world - it's so interested how a Martin Scorsese would show a gangster shooting someone with sheer brutality and Allen captures the same event with his world view.Woody Allen goes digital for the first time in his career, at his 47th film - it's ironic because to shoot most of his films set in the modern world, he used film and to shoot a film that is set in the 1930s - he chose to shoot it in digital. The cinematography by Vittorio Storaro is so strikingly visible, with the yellow all over - it brings in the aesthetics of 1930s without having all the period set pieces too.