The film festival didn't seem very convincing. I assume there were more people at the real thing. It was no Stardust Memories. There are black and white sequences where Wallace Shawn has dreams based on scenes in old movies---Citizen Kane, Seventh Seal, Exterminating Angel and Breathless among others---which didn't work very well.
Shawn plays a film snob who used to teach a class on the subject. He's now trying to write a novel but is hampered by his own impossibly high standards. He goes to the festival with his much younger wife who works as a press agent for a couple of directors. He suspects she's sleeping with one of them. He goes to a young (female) Spanish doctor in an open marriage for chest pains and becomes smitten.
There's a scene where Shawn uses what I assume is correct Japanese pronunciation for Kagamusha and Tatsuya Nakadai. I've only uttered Nakadai's name once in conversation, but I want to confirm he pronounced it correctly in case I ever have to say it again.
They bring up some movies Shawn doesn't like, such as Some Like it Hot, which Allen mentioned not caring for in his memoir.
Maybe it should have bothered me that Wallace Shawn was married to and went after much younger women, but his inadequacies were blatant enough that it wasn't fooling anyone. His motion picture debut was in Manhattan playing Diane Keaton's ex-husband and that was meant as a gag. I've seen movies about older women with much younger men and I didn't find them perverse or upsetting.
I was going through my DVD list on Netflix eliminating anything I could simply watch on streaming video and was surprised to find that this was free on Tubi.
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