SAME REALISATEUR, DIFFERENT LANGUE: WOODY ALLEN'S COUP DE CHANCE (2024)

To hear the seasoned film critic Rex Reed tell it, Woody Allen's new film Coup de Chance (his 50th) "restor(es) the masterful filmmaker to his deserved position as one of the screen's most profound storytellers." That's a lot to hang on such a slight film, and Reed clearly has more at stake in Allen's supposed reputation as "a master storyteller" than I do-- I've never thought of writer-director of tightly woven works of narrative like Annie Hall or Manhattan as anything of the sort. In the past 30 years Allen has directed exactly three movies-- his 1994 TV-movie adaptation of his early play Don't Drink the Water, 1997's Deconstructing Harry and 2014's Magic in the Moonlight-- which I thought were fully engaged works, and three others, 2009's Whatever Works, 2015's Irrational Man and 2021's Rifkin's Festival, which stood out among a very spotty run over the past three decades as possible career worsts.

Coup de Chance might just be, as Reed suggests, Allen's best movie in years, but not because, at age 87, the acclaimed (and beleaguered) writer-director is doing much of anything differently than he has since about 1978. He's still filtering other directors through his own blinkered lens-- this time it's Claude Chabrol Lite rather than Ingmar Bergman Lite (Interiors) or Federico Fellini Lite (Stardust Memories). But the advantage Coup de Chance  has over the last, say, ten movies Allen has made is that, yes, it's in French and not English (the pretensions of his often mannered and obvious dialogue play a lot better subtitled), and the movie is populated by unfamiliar actors (at least they are unfamiliar to me) rather than the usual crowded cast of 15 or 16 players who are in there just because they want to be in a Woody Allen film. (Few young actors have been clamoring for that cachet of late, and some of the ones who did have spent a lot of time and press columns openly distancing themselves from the director for reasons unrelated to whether or not the raison d'etre behind his indefatigable output has seemed increasingly thin for years now.)

The simple truth is, it's easier to relax into Allen's unflappable rhythms as his camera glides down Parisian avenues and through Parisian parks, in the company of young, beautiful, adulterous lovers, all shot with customary beauty by Vittorio Storaro (The Conformist, Last Tango In Paris, Apocalypse Now) and scored to vintage Nat Adderly recordings, and to accept those impossibly lovely young characters for who they seem to be, if you're not constantly distracted by yet another cameo appearance by a familiar face-- Oh, look, it's Wallace Shawn! And there's Andrew Dice Clay! And here comes Selena Gomez! (And really, what goes does it do to repeatedly hire the world's greatest living cinematographer if you just as repeatedly come up goose eggs in the Crafting Memorable Pictures Department-- Storaro does pretty work here, but an hour after the movie was over I couldn't recall a single distinctly expressive image.)

The story starts off among moneyed Europeans of the sort that would fit right into the favored world of Allen's New York-- a chance meeting between a young woman working in the Parisian art world (Lou de Laage) and an up-and-coming writer (Niels Schneider) who has been in love with her since their university days leads the woman to reconsider her marriage to a possibly shady financier (Melvil Poupaud) and, eventually, an affair with her rather persistent old friend. When the financier begins to come around to the possibility of the couple's indiscretions, he hires a detective to follow them and confirm his suspicions, at which point Allen's debt to Chabrol begins to threaten to create ripples on the film's placid surface.

But it turns out that, no major surprise, Allen doesn't have much taste for the nasty elements of the melodrama of infidelity he's set up. Truth be told, he seems to disdain the simple amour of the lovers' predicament too. In Coup de Chance, as in many of the director's other movies, the temperature of the narrative barely varies as the story tracks from intellectual pursuits to romantic complications to, eventually, crimes of passion. The significance of a lottery ticket, for example, which might be red meat in the hands of a Chabrol, and which is given much weight midway through the picture, is a narrative dead end. Rather than playing a part in what eventually happens to the young lovers, Allen is content to use the ticket simply as a clunky metaphor for his ultimately platitudinous premise, that to be alive on Earth at all, in whatever circumstances, is to have already bucked astronomical odds against the likelihood of simple existence, for which we should all be grateful-- especially presumably, if that existence gets to play out in the impossible beauty of Manhattan or along the Champs-Elysees.

As the film begins to play with the elements of suspense and builds (sort of) to its climax, where Chabrol might have finally gotten things boiling, Allen instead rather insistently prefers a simmer which plays almost like indifference. The "coup de chance" (stroke of luck) he ends his story on is so abrupt, it ends up feeling like the deus ex machina of "a master storyteller" who has lost his interest and just wants to grope his way to the end of the scenario-- there's no evidence that he cares at all about building tension or raising the temperature of his audience, or even how he might start to go about doing such a thing.

Coup de Chance goes down easier than an Allen film has in a while because it has the trappings of Paris and the French language to help tart up the proceedings with a patina of sophistication and disguise the fact that there's really not much going on other than beautiful people in beautiful settings gliding sleepily through the motions. But, given how unsatisfying much of Allen's output has been over the past 30 years, that may be well enough for some. I left the theater glad I saw it, glad that I even had the opportunity to see it, glad that what might end up being the capper to an arguably uneven, but (perhaps just as arguably) extraordinary career at least was entirely a leaking bag of warmed-over goods like Whatever Works, or a deadly botch in the manner of Irrational Man or Rifkin's Festival. If you've ever liked a Woody Allen movie, it's hard to imagine not wanting to see and assess for yourself if Allen's stroke of luck has truly held out to the end. 

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