User Reviews

Each movie by Woody Allen (good or bad) has always some sort of layered thought about cinema and the process of writing. All of them are meta-films, in each we find tokens and signs to follow. In Annie Hall it was the idea to approach a narrative from multiple points of view, and that's why we have Alvey speaking directly to the camera, his childhood in flashbacks, tv shows (inside the movie) and even an animated sequence. In Stardust Memories we have the idea (Fellini style) of wiping out the line between the reality and fiction of the character inside the greater fiction that is the film itself. And so on... In each film we can look for and find ideas of this kind. The interesting thing about this Rainy Day... is that these issues are specially explicit. There is a narrative split between two characters, each searching for their own film:

The boy enters a genre movie (thus the literal references to films that belong to a certain collective cinematic memory). The first thing that he does when he finds himself alone is to act in a movie! The romance between his and Selena Gómez's character literally starts at a movie set (a set inside the set of the film we are watching). His character's name is Gatsby Welles - two direct references to a writer and a director. This character IS an actor even if he denies it - he builds his role as the negative of the role his mother pretends him to play. He even buys props like the cigarette holder. He is a pianist, who dreams of playing jazz.

The girl, on the other hand, searches for and writes (quite literally also) her own film, through the meetings (more or less accidental) with, no more no less, than a director, a (script) writer and an actor. She enters their stories, and becomes their center. She feeds on them and writes her own story, as she rewrites everyone else's. The joke is not on her, but on the three men with whom she crosses paths. Each one is a cliché, a stock character like those Woody so many times uses (a probably unintentional wink is that Liev Schreiber, who plays the director, already played Orson Welles in another movie).

There's a poignant scene, near the end, when the apparently frigid and superficial Mother reveals a past that completely overwhelms the idea that the had on the obscurity of his life versus the shallowness of the University where his parents have him studying. The dramatic twist is the idea that the mother has walked down the road the sun wants to trail, she has had the life that he wishes. The mother is the most powerful character. She lived what he can only act.

The end, that Chamalet and Gómez's characters admit to be taken out of a (well known) romantic movie, is so obviously artificial that we know that it can only belong to a movie, not to a real life. It closes the story of the two main characters in a dramatic way, where he will live his movie and she goes on to, presumably, write others'.