Woody Allen’s best film in a decade
For some critics, Woody Allen’s status as a master film-maker has been unfairly overshadowed by the wreck of his private life. But he’s also released some pretty patchy movies.
It’s not often that an audience of hardened media cynics erupts into cheers at the opening, rather than closing, credits. But such was the case at the screening of Coup de Chance, when the words “ecrit et realise par Woody Allen” were the cue for almost unanimous uproarious approval. Clearly, for some critics, Allen’s status as a master film-maker has been unfairly overshadowed by the wreck of his private life.
The truth, however, is that Allen’s status as a master film-maker has also been overshadowed by almost a decade of incredibly patchy movies, culminating in the recent flop double-whammy of A Rainy Day in New York and Rifkin’s Festival (so poor it skipped a UK release). The pre-screening applause yesterday (Monday) was thus premature and yet, as it turns out, also oddly prescient. For Coup de Chance is indeed the best thing that Allen has made in years, certainly since Blue Jasmine in 2013. It’s his first French-language movie (hence “ecrit et realise” etc), with a muscular French cast - led by Melvil Poupaud as a financier with a dark heart - and the shift in creative milieu seems to have invigorated the 87-year-old.
The subject terrain is vaguely familiar, and Allen has cited Match Point as the film’s nearest cousin, though this version is leavened with humour. It features the seemingly perfect Parisian marriage of Poupaud’s wealthy if domineering Jean to the once non-conformist Fanny (Lou de Laage), and how that relationship quickly comes apart when Fanny meets, via a chance street-side encounter (see title), her teenage crush and aspiring novelist Alain (Niels Schneider). Naturally, a clandestine affair beckons.
Allen could have dwelt solely on the melodramatic implications of betrayal and heartache in a film smartly scattered with credible supporting roles, most notably Valerie Lemercier as Fanny’s over-inquisitive mother. But he pushes it further, triggering the psychopath in Jean, and the film skips jauntily, over a near constant jazz-age soundtrack, towards a delightfully silly murder-mystery crescendo. The screen, meanwhile, is bathed in the golden-hour lighting of cinematographer Vittorio Storaro (The Last Emperor) and this is by far the most deliberately filmed Allen movie for some time - A Rainy Day in New York looked like a student rough-cut. Other high points include actual chemistry between the leads and an unfussy subtext about the true meaning of chance and how, statistically speaking, based on reproductive probabilities, “Everyone alive has hit the jackpot.”
And, no, it’s not as good as vintage Woody Allen. But nothing ever is.
★★★★