Rifkin's Festival

Former classic film studies professor turned aspiring albeit struggling novelist Mort Rifkin is relaying to his therapist the story of his recent trip with his wife Sue to the San Sebastian International Film Festival, where she, a publicist, was representing client, French director Philippe, and his much lauded new film, an opinion which Mort doesn't agree with in seeing the film as derivative. Once having reveled in attending such a festival, Mort only went in believing there an increasingly romantic obsession from Sue to Philippe and thus a possible affair between them. As Mort feels like a third wheel in Sue and Philippe's time at the festival, both professional and social, together, he begins a friendship with and romantic attraction to married physician Jo Rojas, who has a history of bad choices in men, including with her current husband, a temperamental artist. Within this situation, Mort begins to have a series of dreams almost like his own classic film festival as situations in his life play out like scenes from such movies as Citizen Kane (1941), Jules and Jim (1962), Persona (1966), A Man and a Woman (1966), The Exterminating Angel (1962), and The Seventh Seal (1957).