Without the backstory—and we will get to that backstory—A Rainy Day in New York might have been yet another late-era Woody Allen movie, indistinguishable from the rest. The sort where it seems like someone (Woody Allen, presumably, because who else) asked an AI chatbot to make a Woody Allen movie, but with modern-day young and youngish actors. The bot worked overtime and came up with three different pseudo-Allens, played by Timothée Chalamet (of Canadian and Jewish background, I had no idea), Liev Schreiber, and (why stop flattering yourself?) Jude Law. How can Jude Law be turned into Woody Allen? The magic of cinema.

Wait I forgot a fourth: an NYU student filmmaker, a blink-and-you-miss-it character who’s halfway between Allen and George Costanza.

There are women as well, and you will never guess what qualities they share, but in case you were stumped: youth, hotness, and attraction to a Woody Allen type.

There’s a scene where Elle Fanning, a modern-day Annie Hall, an aw-shucks naïf from the boonies, flees a tryst in the rain (get it? The title?) in only her underwear and a trench coat. Why she does not close the coat around herself while doing so, as anyone instinctively would in those weather conditions? As the “Magnetic Fields” song goes, “a pretty girl, in her underwear/if there’s anything better in this world, who cares.” This is, presumably, the idea.

Selena Gomez plays the Fanning character’s competition for Chalamet’s character’s affections, and she’s intriguingly (terribly) cast in the role of earthy New Yawk nebbishette. A modern-day sassy Rhoda Morgenstern. A street-smart brunette, who nevertheless lives in a palatial Manhattan apartment decorated like Versailles because where else could a person in a late-Allen movie live?

The plot? College students flirt and cavort their way through a Manhattan more appropriate to a massively successful elderly man. The absence of the world of actual New York under-80s is rationalized in the movie by the Chalamet character being a nostalgic sort. Fine.

The film contains exactly two surprises. The first is in the Diego Luna character, who is most definitely not an Allen clone, and whose mere presence acknowledges the female gaze. (Not to mention the male gays.) So pretty. Le swoon.

It at first seemed a generous choice of Allen, a real act of self-sacrifice, to admit that women find gorgeous men appealing. But then Fanning’s character falling for his charms functions, in the movie, as the final piece of evidence that shallowness, while perfectly acceptable and even expected in men, is sinful in women. It tells the viewer that she’s no good for Chalamet’s character, forcing him to settle for a mini-skirted, perfect-pouted Gomez.

This brings us to the second surprise: the girl-next-door wins out. Instead of being a first wife, a Carol Kane, a comfortable if over-familiar step on the road to the Annie Halls of the world, the moral of the story is, to use a horrible expression that rest assured I do not endorse, that “‘shiksas’ are for practice.”  

Chalamet’s vaguely Jewish-coded Allen-lite is at first enthralled with the Fanning character’s middle-American ditz qualities (an aspiring journalist, she’s for some reason new to the word “scoop”). But in a final holding-forth, in a Central Park horse-drawn carriage, he dumps her because he belongs in New York and she does not. Gomez gets the boy for being of New York as well.

And now… the moment you were waiting for. The movie is kind of from 2019, but also kind of from 2020, the reason being the #MeTooing of its writer and director. While there were no new revelations about Allen at that time, the vibe/zeitgeist had shifted from looking unfavourably upon men of his degree of—and I use this term for its intentional vagueness—problematicness. Many of the actors involved in the film ritually (symbolically, financially) self-flagellated for having done so.

As such, the cultural significance of A Rainy Day in New York is that it marks the before and after. Anyone agreeing to work with Allen in any subsequent films (and I expect there will be another along those lines produced until he is a trillion years old) has made a choice. A choice about ethics, or culture wars, I cannot say, and there’s probably no one answer.

The CJN’s senior editor Phoebe Maltz Bovy can be reached at [email protected] and on Twitter @bovymaltz