Café Society

Woody Allen’s film is a first on the camera side: both Allen and his cinematographer Vittorio Storaro worked with a digital camera here for the first time. Storaro has said he chose the Sony F65 for its 4K colour and its 2:1 image area. Colour carries what the plot leaves unsaid. Storaro describes keeping the New York passages in a narrow chromatic range with a dull nocturnal tone, and building the Hollywood side out of post expressionist painting, Otto Dix and the luminous surfaces of Edward Hopper. You register which coast a scene is on from its temperature before anyone speaks. Jesse Eisenberg plays Bobby and Steve Carell his uncle Phil, a part Carell inherited: shooting had already started in August 2015 when Bruce Willis left over his Broadway schedule. The budget grew along the way, from 18 million dollars to 30 million. Allen narrates the film himself and takes no screen credit for it. The bitterest joke sits in the names: the woman Bobby loses and the woman he later marries are both called Veronica. A good fit if you want colour, rather than dialogue, to tell you which city you are in. Not for anyone who will find a narrator stepping in to explain what the characters feel an intrusion too far.