Crimes et Délits

My thoughts on Coup de Chance

Coup de Chance is the 50th feature film to be written and directed by Woody Allen and there are suggestions that it may well prove to be his final cinematic statement overall. Of course, as those of us who have sat through such recent listless efforts as Wonder Wheel, A Rainy Day in New York and Rifkin’s Festival can attest, an argument could be made that he probably should have packed it in a while ago instead of loading up his filmography with works that hardly seem worthy of rubbing shoulders with such greats as Annie Hall, The Purple Rose of Cairo and Midnight in Paris, to name just a few. While his latest is nowhere the equal of those or his numerous other top-tier efforts, it is easily his most compelling project in a while—one that finds him mulling over a number of the themes that he has explored at length over the years, this time with a jolt of energy and enthusiasm that has been lacking in his films as of late.

Set in Paris (with all the dialogue in French), the film opens with a moment of happenstance, the kind that could be spun out into any number of different narrative threads. In it, writer Alain (Niels Schneider) is walking down the street when he runs into Fanny (Lou de Laage), whom he hasn’t seen since they went to school together years earlier. At the time, Fanny was an arty bohemian type but now, after a failed first marriage, she has settled into a life of overly-comfortable domesticity with Jean (Melvil Poupaud), a rich financier who lavishes expensive baubles upon her despite her fears that she is in danger of being seen as nothing more than a trophy wife. Of course, Alain still sees her as the rebel type that (as he repeatedly insists) he always had an enormous crush on and Fanny, quietly happy at being able to reconnect with this part of herself, finds herself meeting up with him for long lunches in the park. These meetings are not mentioned to Jean, of course, but since it is just lunch, what is the possible harm?

Inevitably, things go further than mere manger and the two are soon meeting for regular rounds of canoodling in Alain’s spacious garret with Fanny confident that Jean is clueless as to what is going on, spending more time obsessing over his elaborate model train setup. However, Jean is not quite the blandly affable guy he seems at first glance—he has a jealous streak, he appears to be very successful at a job where there is a certain murkiness as to where the money is coming from and he once had a business partner who disappeared under mysterious circumstances that people in his social circle still whisper about behind his back. He finally decides to hire a private detective to follow Fanny around in order to dig up information and when his suspicions about her faithfulness are confirmed, he sets into motion a chain of events that I will leave for you to discover.

In essence, Coup de Chance serves as a sort of remix of the key elements of two of Allen’s most popular films. As he did in Midnight in Paris, he presents a highly idealized version of Paris where everyone is impossibly attractive and has plenty of time to skip out on work to gambol in the park for hours in scenes captured for maximum loveliness by legendary cinematographer Vittorio Storaro. Likewise, he revisits the notion explored in Match Point (and to a certain extent in Crimes and Misdemeanors) about the cold-blooded depths that some people will sink to in order to rid themselves of bothersome elements in their life if they are convinced that they can get away with it. The film, it should be noted, is not a comedy per se, though it does have occasional moments of with and concludes on a note of irony that O Henry might have appreciated.

As has been the case as of late, some of Allen’s dialogue is a little stiff and on the nose—characters make the kind of pseudo-profound declarations that he would have skewered mercilessly once upon a time and no one ever seems to be reading or quoting a book that hasn’t been around for 100 years (Not only does one person cite Anna Karenina, they mention a specific translation)—and this sense is only exacerbated upon reading the lines via the subtitles. The film also suffers a bit from Allen’s traditional chasteness as a director, which does at least slightly undercut the grand passions that are meant to be driving the story and the characters along.

However, while those flaws keep Coup de Chance from becoming prime Allen, this project finds him engaged in a way that he simply hasn’t been behind the camera in recent years. Driven by a jaunty score of jazz favorites that alternately complements and contrasts with the on-screen actions, the film moves along with an actual sense of energetic purpose as it slyly shifts from its overly romantic opening underpinnings to something darker and shiftier. The story also takes a number of interesting plot turns, mostly inspired by the arrival of Fanny’s mother (Valerie Lemercier) and her relentlessly inquisitive nature, and leads to a payoff so nifty that you won’t even mind the somewhat contrived setup leading to it. The performances are quite good as well, especially Poupaud as the quietly monstrous Jean, a man who clearly likes to think of himself as a contemporary Jay Gatsby, though he proves to be much closer to Tom Buchanan, de Laage as his Daisy and Lemercier’s scene-stealing turn as the mother.

During the apex of Allen’s filmmaking career, my guess is that few would have guessed that his possible final movie would be a French-shot story that plays at times like Madame Bovary by way of Cornell Woolrich that, barring some kind of miracle, would almost certainly go largely unseen in his home country. That said, the film does not feel like a career summation in the way that so many final movies tend to do, consciously or not. It deals with dark and weighty matters, I suppose, but does so in a manner that is surprisingly light and engaging considering the subject matter. If this does prove to be his last movie, it would be ironic that it would come in the form of the first thing he has done in a while that left me wanting to see what he might do next.