Coup de Chance (2023)
Woody Allen's 50th movie — in French — finds him mellow, witty and thrilling
Allen in Paris directing his smitten young romantic leads, Niels Schneider and Lou de Laâge
Coup de Chance (2023)
In theaters and on streaming services
In nearly every Woody Allen movie, you’re never quite sure what his shifty dreamers might get up to. Slowly, we learn that his characters’ calm, upper middle-class comfort relies on deception. Fooling themselves and others buys them time to keep from being found out.
Coup de Chance (it means “stroke of luck”) takes place in Paris, but Allen’s preoccupation with privileged lives corroding from within easily translates. It’s in French, with an entirely French cast (the subtitles are easy to follow) and asks a perennial Allen question: Do people who have it all, deep down, have it together?
Fanny (Lou de Laâge) sells fine art in a Paris auction house. One day on the street she’s approached by Alain (Niels Schneider), an old schoolmate who’s moved to Paris to work on a new novel. Years before, they’d been high school students at a Lycée Française in New York, where Alain had a deep crush on her.
But they’d gone their separate ways, both to unhappy marriages that ended in divorce. Now Fanny has remarried, happily this time, she insists. Alain hasn’t gotten over his infatuation with her and coaxes her into casual meetings for lunch.
Fanny goes along but reminds him that she loves her husband Jean (Melvil Poupaud), a money manager who works “making rich people richer.”
Jean does quite well for himself, keeping Fanny in a luxurious apartment and surprising her with lavish gifts. He also smothers her, keeping close track of her whereabouts, who she talks to, where and with whom she has lunch. She bridles in the role of Jean’s “trophy wife”.
So, knowing the risk, the discontented Fanny keeps seeing Alain. They begin an affair and while she believes she loves Jean, her husband’s controlling behavior begins to pall. She grows irritated with him, fueling his suspicions that she’s unfaithful. He hires private detectives to track down her lover.
This is hardly unmapped territory, yet Allen’s writing and direction wittily exploit the paranoid edge he’s long since mastered. These three schemers know they’re covering up, and the chance they might be caught only pricks them to keep testing boundaries.
When Fanny goes to Alain’s apartment for lunch, she knows she’s crossing a line, but hasn’t she been wanting to? As Alain seduces her, doesn’t he realize he’s endangering her second marriage?
And how can Jean not understand that his obsessive “affection” for Fanny actually suffocates her – driving her into the arms of someone like the laid-back Alain?
But Allen lets each of them believe that what the world calls “chance”, once it happens, can in turn be manipulated to get you what you want, never mind whether the world says you shouldn’t have it.
Allen’s jokey, slippery dialogue doesn’t absolutely demand Storaro’s melting elegance, but the Italian’s textured compositions set the New Yorker even more solidly on his expressive game, more able to make hypocrisy and deceit sting as sharply in Paris as they would in Coney Island.
Jean devotes an entire room in the couple’s apartment to an elaborate set up of toy trains, which he runs like a boy in his outsized playroom. Control is essential to him, and his jealousy inevitably darkens.
Enter the script’s most artful twist, Fanny’s mother Camille (Valérie Lemercier), who comes for a long visit. At first, she chides her daughter for jeopardizing her splendid marriage to a devoted husband. Look how well you live, including escapes to your husband’s baronial weekend country house!
But Jean’s frenetic spying on Fanny begins to stir Camille’s doubts about her apparently ideal son-in-law. What she discovers is alarming, and chance – or could it be another ruse? – pulls her into the marital quagmire.
Allen turns this froth into a buoyant meditation on fate, not to be taken too seriously, but not offhandedly dismissed, either. The insecurity and vanity that prompt us to contrive our own “luck” keep bubbling under the cheerful surface.
The fateful, incendiary triangle: Niels Schneider, Melvil Poupaud and Lou de Laâge
The excellent French actors speak their lines with a pithy sophistication, but Allen’s writing remains comically brazen-American – Molière meets Manhattan. (There are reports that Allen, unusually for him, allowed the actors to ad lib a bit, so confident was he that they grasped the script’s American-inflected irony.)
None of the actors stumbles. The action at first seems to float by, but uneasiness slowly creeps in.
Allen’s tight but silken direction is ably underpinned by Alisa Lepselter’s on-point editing. Her cutting can artfully make a shot seem to end a second or two too soon. Those “robbed” seconds keep us wondering, in scene after scene. whether what we’ve just heard is true.
Setting off the enterprise is Vittorio Storaro’s warm, lush cinematography. This is the gifted colorist’s fifth collaboration with Allen, and for each movie he’s cast exactly the kind of light the story and the actors can bask in.
Here his Paris streets are inviting but always mellow, never clamorous, the perfect ground for testing little lies.
Alain’s tastefully bohemian writer’s lair, Jean’s luxe apartment and his weekend hunting lodge are all warm but deftly shadowed, suggesting we’re not privy to what these people might be concealing.
Working with Allen, Storaro has been inventive in the multiple ways he can light, say, lavishness in Café Society (2016) or unexpected working-class delicacy in Wonder Wheel (2017).
This time his immersive color dignifies and heightens Allen’s satirizing instincts. Here again collaborating artists with two distinct temperaments work to complement one another.
Allen’s jokey, slippery dialogue doesn’t absolutely demand Storaro’s melting elegance, but the Italian’s textured compositions set the New Yorker even more solidly on his expressive game, more able to make hypocrisy and deceit sting as sharply in Paris as they would in Coney Island.
Coup de Chance is a light concoction, more diversion than exposé, a soufflé. But it leaves a bite on the tongue. Allen can’t quite let us go home with a smug grin on our faces.
He doesn’t doubt that life contains strokes of luck. Yet there are also moments when, unpredictably but with insidious, undeniable causes, one’s luck runs out.