Café Society (2016)

Woody Allen's forty-seventh feature arrives in a haze of golden light and trad jazz, following a young Jewish man from the Bronx to Hollywood and back again, and the markers of modern social consciousness are almost entirely absent. The ensemble is white and the central family is Jewish, treated with the casual specificity of memoir instead of commentary. There is no racial reckoning here, no environmental alarm, no economic indictment of the wealthy nightclub patrons who drift through the frame. The film regards its gangsters and socialites as scenery, not as targets. This is nostalgia wearing a linen suit, and it makes no apologies for the fit.

The romance at the center belongs to Bobby's longing, and Vonnie is granted enough agency to choose the wrong man twice, which the film treats as tragedy rather than as a structural critique of anything. No LGBTQ characters appear. No neurodivergent ones. The 1930s are reconstructed as a warm, softly lit backdrop for heartbreak, not as a historical argument. There is a mild philosophical murmur running beneath the narration, that wistful Allen voice pondering love and fate and the impossibility of having it both ways, and this is the closest the picture comes to preaching. It is a gentle sermon, delivered from a comfortable chair, about the universal disappointment of getting what we wanted.

The result is a handsomely photographed trifle, and I use that word with affection. It asks nothing of its audience beyond a willingness to watch beautiful people be slightly sad in period clothing. The final New Year's Eve sequence, two spouses drifting apart in separate rooms, lands with a quiet ache. That ache is earned. It is also entirely personal, and the film has no interest in making it political. Some vintages are simply meant to be sipped, not interrogated.