Woody Allen's 2016 Film

Alexandros Angelopoulos Apostolos · July 18, 2016

The Hollywood Reporter has an article about Storaro and his work on the film:

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/behind-screen/cinematographer-vittorio-storaro-filming-cafe-911441

Edited July 18, 2016 by Alexandros Angelopoulos Apostolos

David Mullen ASC · July 18, 2016

I saw the film this weekend. It looked lovely overall.

Twice I saw some odd digital problem, one was a wonderful shot in an apartment where the lights inside go out, silhouetting the characters against some candles and a backlit curtain - the camera tracked into a closer 2-shot but for some reason the candle flames had an odd chattering black edge/line on one side of the flame, not really edge enhancement, almost some sort of sensor protect function.

The other was more subtle, a shot of a car outside in the street in hazy overhead sunlight where the glow of the hot sky reflected on the car had almost a solarized look.

Other than that problem, that silhouette shot was probably my favorite in the movie.

Even with Cooke lenses, the movie is very sharp except for the diffused shots, which look like nets were used. I understand the reasoning, the diffusion is used to visually mark Kristen Stewart's character as some sort of romantic ideal for the male characters, but the jump in sharpness is a bit jarring considering how crisp most of the movie is -- I feel either the whole movie needed some very mild filtration so that those diffused scenes didn't jump out so much, or the diffused scenes needed a lighter grade of filtration to be less obvious. If the movie had been even more stylized to look like a 1930's movie, then the diffused close-ups would have been part of recreating that aesthetic, but that wasn't so clear here.

I know that Allen prefers a cream-colored warm design for his movies, but it would have been nice for the Hollywood scenes to have incorporated more blues and greens into the costumes (since they talked about a Technicolor look) to contrast even more with the scenes in New York.

There was a lovely desaturated shot of the sister character reading a letter in a wood-paneled ice cream parlor in the Bronx, softly backlit from the windows. Felt like a commercial for some sort of artisanal old-fashioned ice cream...

The cleanliness, clarity and sharpness of the digital image is definitely modern -- I wonder if the NYC scenes should have been shot on film at least, letting the Hollywood scenes seem more vivid and hyper-polished in comparison.

A lot of the interiors seem to have been shot at a deep enough f-stop for the candles and other point sources to create a starburst flare even though unfiltered. I'm not sure at what stop on a wide-angle Cooke lens you start to get that effect.

I was glad though that the color design wasn't on the nose in terms of making Hollywood golden and NYC cold and blue, there were more variations than that even though there was a lot more "sunset" lighting in the Hollywood scenes (but that's almost more realistic.) I loved the opening shot in Hollywood with the golden key light raking a swimming pool party as the white art deco building is bathed in soft blue twilight.

The story was oddly structured (and for a film called "Cafe Society" I don't recall any scenes in a cafe...) so it was hard to see a visual arc that clearly starts at one look to end at another, since the movie ends in a lot of nightclub scenes in NYC which are just as glamorous as the early Hollywood scenes. I don't think this is a fault, it's just the look that the storyline creates. I guess maybe that's the point, the main character almost recreates Hollywood glamour back to NYC rather than leaves it behind.

I think it would have been a better movie if there had been at least a decade jump between the time when you first meet the two romantic leads and when they meet again; then there would have been a bittersweet quality as they realize how much they have changed and moved on in their lives. But it seems that barely a year passes overall in the storyline and yet we are supposed to believe these two characters went from young and innocent to jaded and sophisticated. The last shot juxtaposing the two characters could have been even more poignant had they more clearly aged compared to the start of the movie.

Alexandros Angelopoulos Apostolos · August 29, 2016

I was wondering does anybody have any idea when Vittorio might pop up in the American Cinematographer to talk about this? When does the magazine come out? Tenth day of the month or something like that? I have the impression that previously this page

http://theasc.com/magazine_includes/index.php

showed the current month and the two following ones, but now it is the current month times two and the following month. Or perhaps my impression is wrong.