Coup de Chance (2023)
Directed by Woody Allen
There was a time when I’d look forward to an annual Woody Allen new release. From 2008’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona to 2016’s Cafe Society, I caught all of his films in theaters. Afterward, his work would get confined to streaming, and amidst continued allegations of sexual abuse dating back to the 1990s, his work would be relegated to Amazon Prime with little to no fanfare. Not that films like Wonder Wheel or A Rainy Day in New York demanded attention - they were largely forgettable exercises that showed the octogenarian at his most listless and unenthused.
To accuse Allen of regurgitating the same idea is, in itself, a regurgitated idea. He writes and directs what he knows. There’s comfort in that, but there’s also a distinct lack of a challenge. As opposed to the accusations that were levied against Allen in the 90s, wherein he’d follow his most formally ambitious work in Husbands and Wives with the critically-lauded Bullets Over Broadway and Mighty Aphrodite, he could still court major actors to his projects. It's not difficult to find stories about the renown of working with Allen, who, for example, cast Edward Norton in Everyone Says I Love You without providing him with a script, let alone informing him that’d be performing in a musical. These days, c'est très en vogue en ce moment is an exodus, where the same litigated and re-litigated past has forced the likes of Timothée Chalamet and Greta Gerwig to take sides & make statements.
I approached Coup de Chance, with its cast of largely unknown French actors, with a modicum of curiosity. It’s been over a decade since Allen has made a film that would seemingly deviate from his typical template, and the decidedly New York filmmaker, whose passion for filmmaking can be reignited under the auspices of European influence (the London locales of Match Point, the aforementioned Vicky Cristina Barcelona, and of course Midnight in Paris), returns. We all learned a lot about ourselves during COVID, and I’m left to wonder, with Allen’s first work in four years - did he?
The film centers on Fanny (Lou de Laâge), a Parisian art dealer, who meets up with an old friend from her past in Alain (Niels Schneider). Fanny’s married to an opulent wealth manager named Jean (Melvil Poupaud), who’s affinity for model trains ends up being one of his more Hitchcockian tells. Nevertheless, the film is a familiar one for Allen, who observes Fanny’s steady stagnation within polite society as she comes to grips with Alain’s meager but honest lifestyle. An affair begins and Jean, the possessive type, has his suspicions, prompting him to not just hire a private detective, but to inevitably consider murder.
Whether your reference point is the aforementioned Match Point or Allen’s masterwork Crimes and Misdeamanors, the most intriguing aspect of Coup de Chance has been observing Allen’s casual resignation of control. Martin Landau’s speech in Misdeamanors always struck me, despite the hubris, as a kind of statement dedicating to controlling one’s destiny; a refusal to let that with which is out of his control dictate his life. He would get away with murder. What followed in Match Point (somehow even more of a riff on Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment than Misdeamanors), is an observation on how chance - the way a tennis ball can clip the net and sway from side of the court to the other - plays just a big of a role. But the lead male, white character does indeed get away with murder. Coup de Chance is a reinterogation of this ideal, a sort of hands-up-in-exasperated-defeat acknowledgement. As Fanny and her mother uncover the truth regarding Alain’s mysterious disappearance and Jean’s past, Allen pits the vices of infidelities, lies, betrayal, and murder against each another, leaving it up to the cosmos to assign punishment on these infractions. Our will to exorcise those sins seem to play no part in his judgement.
It’s Allen’s 50th film, an accomplishment that, as the New York Times articulated, can best be described as muted. Coup de Chance is by no means Allen’s best film nor is it an especially good one - Vittorio Storaro’s photography is glaringly orange, the cadence and rhythms of Allen’s dialogue, which struggled to keep tempo in his latter works, is especially flat when spoken in French, and Melvil Poupaud’s performance is exceedingly mid - but his interrogation of past themes does have me thinking about how a filmmaker like Allen has contributed to my understanding of love, relationships, and particularly infidelity. There's a hierarchy to vice, as Allen suggests, along with its corresponding culpability. The division between the two can seemingly be left up to fate to decide. Or perhaps it’s just motivated reasoning, where I’m cherry-picking ideas and notions that support conclusions and beliefs that I’m versted in maintaining. All acts of self-deception that, I think, we all partake in to some degree or another. I suppose the difference being that Allen knows this and makes no qualms about confronting these belief systems, interrogating his own past the only way he knows how.