The director draws Timothée Chalamet, Elle Fanning and Selena Gomez into a disenchanted romantic comedy.
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All begins a few hundred kilometers from Central Park in a university in the Northeast, where Gatsby Welles (Timothée Chalamet) was exiled by his mother, a pillar of good New York society, who hopes that his offspring will cultivate more his intellect there as his gifts for poker and gambling den piano. The young man has seduced Ashleigh (Elle Fanning), heiress of a Texan banker, whose reserves of enthusiasm are equal to those of oil from her native state. In a few shots, Woody Allen obtains from these two ultramodern actors the reincarnation of a couple coming out of a comedy of the Hollywood golden age. The weary worldliness that Gatsby displays, the effervescence of Ashleigh could be those of Cary Grant and Ginger Rogers.
It’s time to get them on the bus to New York. There, the journalism student has to interview Roland Pollard (Liev Schreiber), a tormented director. The literary student hopes that the interview will be completed quickly, in order to make the rounds of the hotel bars he imagined for his girlfriend.
Barely stepped on the pavement of Manhattan, the two go their separate ways. As Ashleigh follows in the filmmaker’s wake, Gatsby grapples with the ghosts of his New York life: his brother, his former high school mates and one of them, Shannon’s sister (Selena Gomez), as brown and caustic as the Texan is blonde and idealistic.
Dance between reality and fiction
Like generations of actors before him, Timothée Chalamet slips into this incarnation of the new male -Yorkais as Woody Allen had designed it, when he took on the lead. One of the best footage from A Rainy Day in New York features the instant hiring of Gatsby on a street shoot in Greenwich Village, for a scene that demands he kiss the young premiere. Superimpose, without ever masking each other, the director’s nostalgia for a place which – in the New York of 2019 – is nothing more than a setting, the energy of young actors, the fascination for the eternal restarting the dance between fact and fiction.
Meanwhile, Ashleigh slips into the skin of the ingenue in danger. Fascinated and duped by the alcoholic depression of the director, she follows in his footsteps to soon lose his track. Woody Allen, screenwriter, keeps the character between naivety and blindness for a long time. Ashleigh then acts as a revealer of the small mediocrities and the great weaknesses of these famous men.
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