There are only two clues that the French-language Coup de Chance, which opens in theaters around Israel on October 5, is a Woody Allen movie. The first is the jazzy score, although it’s actually more modern than the Dixieland or swing he usually favors. The second is the very basic opening credits, white letters on a black background in a font we have come to associate with the director.
What follows is an uninspired tale of an extramarital affair that goes bad, set among the Parisian bourgeoisie, just as Allen’s Match Point told a similar story in London, almost 20 years ago. But although everyone and everything looks great – the apartments are as beautiful as any ever seen in an Allen movie, the clothes are lovely, the cast is great-looking, and even the baguettes are mouth-watering – nothing here is remotely as sexy as the making-out-in-the-rain scene between Scarlett Johansson and Jonathan Rhys Meyers in Match Point.
Coup de Chance is so lackluster that it’s almost as if someone fed an AI program the command: Write a script in French about an adulterous affair that inspires violent jealousy, set in Paris – and throw in some literary dialogue. In fact, if you have an AI program, try that command now and I bet whatever it spits out won’t be that different from Coup de Chance.
People who are still reading this review at this point are either – a) die-hard Woody Allen fans, who want to hear more so that so that they can convince themselves that I’ve got it wrong and there actually is something to enjoy in this movie that they are, inevitably, going to see no matter what, or – b) Woody Allen haters, who can’t believe such a disgusting pedophile has made another movie and that it is getting reviewed respectfully. Let me address the second group first, because it’s easier: Woody Allen has never been convicted of a crime, nor has he been charged with one, and as long as this is true and his movies keep opening, I’ll keep reviewing them. Some of his actions may strike many people as creepy, but creepy is not criminal.
TO THE first group, I can only say that if you have hung in there through some of Allen’s blander movies, such as a A Rainy Day in New York, which, like Coup de Chance, never got US distribution, and you still feel there is something worthwhile in watching Allen’s work, you won’t suffer too much during this. If you had no idea Allen was involved, and you were streaming this movie on Netflix, you might make it to the end.
So what is the movie about?
The movie is about Fanny (Lou de Laage), a young Parisian woman who works in an auction house and is married to Jean (Melvil Poupaud), a slightly older, wealthy businessman whose passion, apart from giving Fanny diamond jewelry, is playing with an elaborate electric train set.
One day on the street, she runs into Alain (Niels Schneider), a former classmate of hers from their days at the Lycee Francais, a tony Manhattan prep school. He had a big crush on her back then, and he still does. He is an unpublished novelist who writes in longhand but still has enough cash to rent an apartment in a fashionable neighborhood where Fanny works. They start to go for long lunches in the park and you really don’t need any more explanation to guess where this is going.
While the movie excels as pure eye candy, there was never a moment when I was caught up in the movie enough to really care what happened next. Lou de Laage, who plays Fanny, resembles Rachel McAdams crossed with Isabelle Adjani and Jeanne Moreau and someone else I couldn’t place.
Trying to figure out which other actress she resembles kept me more engrossed than anything else in the movie. She was last seen a year ago playing a Haredi woman who falls in love with the owner of an Italian lulav farm in (no, I’m not making this up) Where Life Begins.
Melvil Poupaud, who is a very youthful-looking 50-year-old, was more sympathetic and attractive than I imagine Allen wanted him to be as Fanny’s husband, Jean. Partly because a private detective figures in the plot of Coup de Chance, I realized that Jean reminded me of a character in Francois Truffaut’s delightful 1968 dramedy, Stolen Kisses, a shoe store owner who hires a detective to discover why no one likes him. This store owner is kind of a nudnik, but he grows on you, and I kept thinking that for a hell of a lot of women, a guy whose worst vices are bringing home expensive jewelry and playing with his trains would be the perfect husband.
BUT OF course, we’re meant to dislike him because he is bourgeois and materialistic, while Alain is meant to represent some higher value of literary aspiration and sweetness. But there really isn’t much to think about when Coup de Chance is over, other than either being glad that Allen can longer get a movie financed in English, or being angry over that.
Interestingly, not long after I saw Coup de Chance, I happened across a re-run of an episode of The Sopranos. I hadn’t seen it in years, but I instantly realized that it was the one where Carmela goes to a Jewish shrink who tells her he won’t take blood money and won’t treat her unless she leaves Tony, and Tony roughs up Junior’s oncologist on a golf course because the doctor won’t return his calls.
Of course, Woody Allen’s French drama of love and death isn’t meant to be compared to this TV show about a New Jersey mobster. And yet, the television show has characters you care about no matter how flawed they are, black humor, suspense, and every variety of human drama – just what you might have expected from a Woody Allen movie about an extramarital love affair – 30 years ago. But the days when a movie by Allen gave you anything to think over afterward are long gone and they’re likely not coming back, no matter what language he has his scripts translated into.