Review: Coup de Chance
Un Film de Woody Allen
Coup de Chance (Dir. Woody Allen, 2023)
Compact and assured, Woody Allen’s Coup de Chance is as well engineered as the extravagant model-train display owned by Jean, the calculating, charismatic, and soon-to-be betrayed young husband at the film’s center. Filmed in Paris, which looks lush and luminous via Vittorio Storaro’s classical warm-hued cinematography (Gordon Willis would approve), Coup de Chance speeds forward with the confidence of a director who has fifty feature films under his khaki hat. Performed in French–a refreshing change (albeit one that reminds us of so many better films by French directors)–it combines the upscale sheen of a romantic comedy with the snappy urgency of a B-movie noir.
We are just ten seconds into the film when the expat writer Alain runs into Fanny–his long-ago high-school crush–on the Avenue Montaigne. She tells him she has moved to Paris from America, and is now married. The love triangle plot is in motion, and if the obvious precursors Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) and Match Point (2005) are any indication, one member of the triangle will not survive. Jean, the soon-to-be betrayed husband is a control-freak who adores Fanny but treats her like a trophy wife. The newly bourgeois Fanny has learned to suppress her bohemian soul. And Alain is a handsome young divorcee who has rented a Paris flat to find his inner Hemingway, writing in longhand a novel that is more earnest than Ernest.
As befitting a true noir, the bad guy, Jean, the financier with a shady past and a penchant for shotguns, is also the most compelling character, and clearly the one that Allen finds the most interesting. (In the film’s press notes, the actor Melvil Poupaud said “through his words I could feel that [Allen] was somewhat close to the character and that he related to him from the inside.”) Jean has secrets. We know this because he tells us. Rather than letting subtext remain subtext, Allen has Jean reveal his dark side to his visiting mother-in-law while showing off his train set, which takes up a full room in his and Fanny’s luxury apartment (and is comprised of precious collectible train models built by the German company Märklin in the 1950s). In a bit of screenwriting that would be clumsy in any language, Jean confides to her “I was always picked on by my parents and my so-called friends, and my impulse was to get on a train and escape anywhere. I love trains–you enter a tunnel, and it is dark, sinister, frightening. Only then do I see what life is like. Then I finally see light and the tunnel opens up. When I come out, I’m changed, I’m no longer this boy, weak and afraid.”
An otherwise fleet thriller, Coup de Chance is sporadically weighed down by this sort of heavy-handed psychologizing and by Allen’s career-long penchant for trite philosophizing. His serious ideas have always tended to work best when turned into jokes (like the gag in Annie Hall: “I was thrown out of college for cheating on the metaphysics exam; I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me.”) Alain, the writer, pontificates that life is a random event, and that the odds of existing are one in four hundred quadrillion, a nod to existentialism that feels more like something gleaned from a stale TED talk. Allen built his career as a savvy intellectual who critiques, with zingers, the poseurs and morons around him. It’s unfortunate, then, to be reminded how facile his own ideas can be.
And yet…he knows how to make movies. He has mastered the tools of the trade, working with economy and grace and with an assured sense of visual style that extends to production design and costumes. Its clumsy by-the-numbers expository moments aside, Coup de Chance has barely an ounce of fat (except for its persistent laid-on bouncy jazz soundtrack which had me thinking I had left another window open on my laptop while watching the film), and many of the scenes play out in skillfully choreographed long takes. Keeping the pace moving, this technique also gives the actors space to work in, and lets their performances breathe. And this is where the movie is at its best. Melvil Poupaud as Jean reveals the tragedy behind his character’s controlling and violent impulses. Lou de Laâge as Fanny lets us feel the depth of her discontent with her secure but empty new life, and even Niels Scheider as Alan draws us into the hopeless relentlessness of his overly romanticized crush. But still, it all feels too schematic. It’s hard to watch Coup de Chance and not think about how filmmakers like Mia Hanssen-Love, Rebecca Zlotowsky, or Philippe Garrel, to name just a few, make relationship movies that feel literary, but also messy and organic, rather than the solid, well-engineered, lifelike but not quite real model train display of a movie that Allen has created.
Coup de Chance opens in theaters on April 5, 2024, including the Quad Cinema (NY), Cinema Arts Centre (Huntington, NY), Laemmle Monica Film Center (Santa Monica), and more.