New York, thirties. Bobby Dorfman leaves his father’s workshop and the East Coast to California, where his uncle manages artistic agency and the vagaries of Hollywood stars. Annoyed by the irruption of the nephew and convinced of his ineptitude, after long delayed, receives and takes as a messenger. Bobby, lost in Beverly Hills and head to New York, he finds it before the smile of Vonnie, secretary (and lover) of his uncle. For him it was love, for her no but time and fate give reason to the feeling of Bobby who proposed to marry him and move with him to New York. But the wind is (again) on his lap and Vonnie decides otherwise. Once back in the only city in which can be thought of, Bobby directs the charm of the “Café Society”, sophisticated night club that becomes the meeting point of the world that counts. Married, father and successful man, years later receives a surprise visit from Vonnie. With champagne, Bobby (re) opens the heart and will (re) opens the sweet delirium of love.
Comedy of pleasure denied, Café Society is the chronicle of a history of failure to love that reiterates what Woody Allen has always been: the cinema, women, himself. Himself especially since the author’s uniqueness lies in the persistence with which he gave to a central character to show its crisis and passing away (Deconstructing Harry, Hollywood Ending). It is a persistence that evidently belongs to comedy but Allen leads in terms of serial biography, he declined in different names, different professions, different ages and even several centuries of age. And the era this time is the second half of the thirties, Allen does not specify the exact year but it is the history to collapse in film and to deposit the ruins in the comedy (the couple who dined with Adolf Hitler) through the voice over of ‘ author who plays the role of narrator, measuring a romantic drama with a social drama. Do not crowd the local scene and out of his field tells a new story, the story of Bobby Dorfman where once again expresses his romantic hero, loser false, schlemiel only alleged and superbly embodied by Jesse Eisenberg. To him, who burns with love exaltation and voluptuous irony, Allen delegate himself, a younger self and insecure, still plagued by problems with women, who still believe in the definitive words and no longer believe in the big scenes. Out of the shadows where he built his best roles and overexposed in the blinding light of California, Eisenberg pronunciation with faltering speech thoughtful words and consciously unbalanced beyond themselves loose in the fluidity of the dialogue and sustained by a wonderful rhythmic subtext comic performance.
But Café Society is however, the self-image triumph. Between grace and catastrophe, between war and peace, between Los Angeles and New York, between external and internal, Allen shows what he can do with the dialogue and would know what to do without because its décor is an overbuilt and overcrowded movie, figuratively daring. Having revitalized the cynicism of Billy Wilder (Irrational Man), with Café Society resurfaces the sophisticated splendor of Ernst Lubitsch doing the loving intermittently two restless characters along a shimmering surface that allows emotion to blossom, see reality and approaches death not with the arrogance of a young man who believes he has discovered the secrets of the universe (Love and Death) but with the wisdom of an old man who knows that the only omen against extinction are the memories. Those who design its intimate skyline, the concrete one of his childhood (Brooklyn) and accessible only by the imagination and photography of Vittorio Storaro (Manhattan).
Fragment of a unique and complex biopic, Cafe Society raises the island city as the best of all possible worlds, inhabited in a short taste meeting leaniano by Bobby and Vonnie, ancestors of Alvy and Annie (Annie Hall) that leave us at the same so hostages of a feeling and we dismiss in an atmosphere of renunciation and yearning to melodrama. But the inability to fulfill the desire, or of being thought of in two, tempered by the ability to recall the first love every day of life and the certainty that the object of that love the spare parts at the same instant. Moments lost in time and loose on Kristen Stewart Snow face.