Robert Horton is a Scarecrow board member and a longtime film critic. This series of "critic's notes" is chance to highlight worthy films playing locally and connect them to the riches of Scarecrow's collection.
Woody Allen's Coup de chance is occasionally funny and sometimes bracingly ironic, but if you take the final sequence as a summary statement (it involves the reading of a hidden manuscript), then it's his bleakest movie since Blue Jasmine. The story is one of his murder tales, but that's not specifically the source of the bleakness; what really chills is the shrug of withdrawal in its final moments.
All of which would be more interesting if Coup de chance were a sharper movie, but this one suffers from the hallmarks of so many of his late-career titles: casual pacing, indifferent blocking, over-reliance on pre-existing music (this is one Allen film that would have benefited from an original soundtrack), and the bet that Vittorio Storaro's cinematography will make things more seductive. Which it does, but more like luscious wallpaper than expressive visual tool. The movie's in French, as you've heard, and this does add something, if only to disguise (to the English-language ear, anyway) Allen's recent laziness about crafting dialogue.
The language is a reminder that Allen's cinematic taste has long been drawn to the great wave of international filmmakers who overtook the American arthouse during the 1950s and 60s—the Woodman has made entire movies out of his love of Bergman and Fellini. The realm here is the kind of domestic murder film perfected by Claude Chabrol (see Le boucher and La femme infidèle for definitive examples), in which love and death turn psychopathic. Here, a married woman (Lou de Laâge) begins an affair with an old schoolmate (Niels Schneider), as her wealthy husband (Melvil Poupaud) suspects. The character of the husband is promising: an attempt by Allen to sketch in one of our era's imperious male monsters, a "businessman" whose work is so vague even his wife doesn't know exactly what he does to make his money. Her own vagueness as a character—other than being, by her own troubled account, a "trophy wife"—means we can believe she'd marry this man anyway.
That mystery—of an evil even larger than jealousy or murder—keeps the movie intriguing, and there's a boost from the sly, focused Valerie Lemercier, as the wife's mother, whose curiosity drives the story in its final section. This means Coup de chance is not a dud, but it's not a return to form, either. You'd think that Allen might feel he had something to prove these days, and yet his approach looks lax. That shrug, again—not the shrug of wise acceptance, but of resignation.
May 31, 2024
