Woody Allen’s 88, as “canceled” as a decades-long veteran filmmaker can be, and unable to make a film in the United States. But that doesn’t mean he’s finished, despite the semi-annual ritual in which he gives an interview about his supposed pending retirement that turns out to have been mistranslated from another language.
Allen’s back with a new film called Coup de Chance, which is getting something of a domestic theatrical release this time. His last film, 2022’s Rifkin’s Festival, was primarily a VOD release in the U.S. and starred seventysomething Wallace Shawn as a slightly younger Woody stand-in acting miserable despite attending a film festival in a beautiful locale with his wife, played by Gina Gershon. The only time I watched the Woody movie before that, 2019’s A Rainy Day in New York, was on an airplane.
Coup de Chance debuted at the Venice Film Festival last fall and is French all through. It was made in France and is entirely in French, with a French title (it means “Stroke of Luck”) and an all-French cast—and they’re not French actors who’ll be familiar to many American audiences. Allen allegedly doesn’t even speak the language himself.
Coup de Chance is mid-level Woody. Whether focusing on Paris or the people, it looks gorgeous—the work of cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, who hasn’t deserted him, has been the best part of Allen’s later period work—and the performances are decent. It’s mostly a drama with a hint of thriller elements; there’s not much humor but a lot of irony. And as usual, the music is well-chosen, with Herbie Hancock’s Cantaloupe Island featured throughout.
Yet the film concerns many topics Allen’s covered before—clandestine romantic affairs, getting away with murder, and the temptation for rich and comfortable people, especially those living in Paris, to pursue a Bohemian lifestyle instead. It never finds the layer of profundity that Allen’s best work has.
The protagonist is Fanny Fournier (Lou de Laage), a young woman married, seemingly happily, to a wealthy man named Jean (Melvil Poupaud), whose wealth may have come about by sketchy means. They live in a gorgeous Paris apartment, but she’s bored, and once she runs into an old classmate named Alain (Niels Schneider), they fall into a passionate affair. The fourth central character is Fanny’s nosy mother, Camille (Valérie Lemercier).
There’s a murder and the hint of others of them before. And perhaps because Allen has mostly abandoned Judaism as a topic, it’s notable that this movie’s murderer reacts with considerably less guilt than did Martin Landau in my favorite Allen film, Crimes and Misdemeanors. If you’re looking for a recent French film about marriage and murder, Anatomy of a Fall did it better.