I remember reading years ago that whenever the time comes for Woody Allen to make a new film, he opens a drawer in his desk and picks at random from the piles of scripts he has written over the years. If this is true, it would explain much of the impersonal and artificial quality of his later output, which, though hitting all the beats expected of his personal brand of cinema, is so clunky and clumsily put together as to feel like a joke at the expense of the people who still bother to watch his work.
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Much of the audience at the second press screening of his latest “effort,” however, were clapping at the mere appearance of his name on the screen, an act of defiance against naysayers who obviously were not in the room, and at the “cancellation” of a filmmaker whose mediocre films still play at major film festivals. In such a climate, a journalist trying to maintain a delicate perspective on a director who has twice been cleared of all allegations in court but has continued to be accused since may despair at humanity regardless of what the truth of the matter might be.
Does Allen himself let this counter-wave of support get to him? It is hard to imagine he was not surrounded by yes-men when he made “Coup de Chance,” playing out of competition at this year’s Venice Film Festival. Although the film is more cohesive than his last few, it remains stressfully wobbly work, where the most conspicuous absence is the joy of verbose dialogue that first made his name.
Non-native French speakers may not notice quite as much the incredibly tortuous nature of the sentences his cast is tasked with delivering, often while Vittorio Storaro’s inexplicably fish-eyed lens swirls all around them. The film is set in Paris and opens on a scene familiar from Allen’s most famous work, namely a chance encounter in the city. Fanny (Lou de Laâge) is recognized by Alain (Niels Schneider), a former classmate from high school, who admits almost immediately that she was his first big crush, a girl he loved for years but never dared approach. It’s a relatively simple scene, with the two protagonists endearingly flustered and understandably fumbling for words, but this does not explain the awkward turns of phrase and odd body language between them.
The strangeness of the dialogue is particularly jarring during the film’s group scenes, where Allen has his bourgeois characters talk as though they were in New York and not in the city of Arnaud Despleschin’s “My Sex Life… or How I Got into an Argument.” Rather than talk over each other about different things at once, they should be listening intently, going down strange tangents with passion, occasionally bursting into song. That the film’s entire conception of Paris has little to do with reality does not really bear mentioning, but Allen also fails to create a romantic vision of the city that would help digest the film’s most unbelievable aspects.
Fanny is married to Jean (Melvil Poupaud), a domineering husband whose possessiveness comes to the surface when she begins to spend her lunchtimes with Alain, innocently at first, then not at all. The appeal is obvious: Alain is a writer whose grand romantic statements and attempt to live a bohemian life make him look like a rather unserious prospect but are comparatively more fun than Jean’s judgmental and controlling ways. Allen presents these characters’ qualities in the faux casual way he has always used and which has been copied by many others since. Before a party, for example, Fanny refuses to wear an expensive piece of jewelry Jean has offered her because she is afraid to be seen as a trophy wife — we then cut to said party, where people are calling her a trophy wife. This being a Woody Allen film, it goes without saying that these friends always privately criticize one another, going from a polite hello to a sarcastic aside without so much as moving an eyebrow. But of course, trapped in their own gilded cages, all seem absolutely desperate to spend all of their free time together. For several weekends in a row, and to Fanny’s growing frustration, they meet at the couple’s country house, doing the kind of outdoorsy activities Jean loves: “Kayaking, hiking, hunting” is practically his catchphrase. Jean is a rich man; not unrelatedly, he benefited a few years before from the mysterious disappearance of one of his business associates, who is rumored to have been murdered.
From there, the film follows its expected course, where infidelity and lies lead to murder. As usual with Allen, beyond the mere plot, there is also an overall theme, which here is laid out in Alain’s manuscript: it is essential, he claims, to recognize the role of chance in life and the ironic situations that often arise as a result. Jean, a self-made man, insists that he makes his own luck — which will turn out to be an eminently ironic statement for the man. The duality between chance and control is satisfyingly explored through the story’s development, but the latter is devoid of surprise. If some fun could have been had from watching good actors making these expected moves, it is dampened by the film’s continuously creaky execution.
Poupaud comes across best, partly because his character is an amusingly extreme caricature that sees him play a jealous husband with terrifying intentions for the second time this year (after Valérie Donzelli’s Cannes competition title “Just the Two of Us”). Valérie Lemercier, as Fanny’s mother, tries her best to imbue her part with some personality and is responsible for the single funniest shot in the film. But there isn’t anything here that Allen hasn’t done before, and better. “Coup de Chance” narrowly avoids coming across as a parody of a Woody Allen film, but not by much. [C]
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