If youre looking for an inviolable law of cinema, one that you can more or less can take to the bank, the Venice Film Festival just confirmed an ironically delightful one. It is this: Murder agrees with Woody Allen. We already knew that, of course. We knew it from Crimes and Misdemeanors, a drama that was shocking when it came out in 1989 and if you see it today, its still shocking, because the theme of the movie isnt just that ordinary people commit murder (we see that in movies every day). Its that they seem disturbingly ordinary even as theyre doing it, which is a bit frightening. Martin Landau, as a mild bourgeois ophthalmologist who hires someone to kill off his mistress, seemed to be playing the squirmy essence of every amateur criminal, and the fact that he got away with it was the unsettling part. It made you think: How many people like that are out there?
Match Point, Allens 2005 romantic thriller, was a related but different sort of movie, one that brought off something even more subversive. It put you in the shoes of a total scoundrel (a social climber played by Jonathan Rhys Meyers), got you to swoon along with him at his new brother-in-laws girlfriend (played by Scarlett Johansson), and then completed the adulterous journey with a scene of homicide that would have left Alfred Hitchcock tingling.
Coup de Chance, the new Woody Allen film that premiered today at Venice, completes what I guess we can now call Allens Killer Inside Me trilogy. Its another drama involving an act of murder instigated by a character who strikes us as too civilized and normal to do such a thing. But even as Allen offers another variation on the theme, he has made a movie thats as different from the other two as they were from each other. Set in Paris, Coup de Chance was made with a cast of French actors (the movie is in French, with subtitles), and its rooted in a jaded Continental knowingness about matters of love, marriage, adulteryand getting rid of the people who are gumming up your life. The film has a jaunty tone of deadpan glee, abetted by its soundtrack of 60s jazz nuggets, notably Herbie Hancocks Cantaloupe Island. Its not a comedy, but as you watch it you can almost see Woody Allen standing off to side, chuckling at the human folly hes showing you.
In recent years, the drama of Allens career has all been offscreen, related to the refusal of companies to distribute his movies in the U.S., all due to the accusations of sexual abuse made against him by his daughter, Dylan. He has not had a film released in America since Wonder Wheel, in 2017. That means that the two films he has made since, Rifkins Festival (2020) and A Rainy Day in New York (2019), have not been shown in America but Ive seen them, and they are dreadful. Both are comedies that feel like Allen going through the motions of jokes, themes, and urban intellectual tics hes done a thousand times before. Hes now 87, and when it comes to comedy it really has begun to feel like hes a squeezed-out lemon.
But drama! That may be another story. As you watch Coup de Chance, you can see that the characters occupy a milieu familiar from Allens beloved Manhattan (sprawling tasteful apartments, a kind of flip chattering-class effervescence), but they dont wax on about the meaning of life and the decay of contemporary culture and all those other once-vital, now-creaky Allen obsessions. Theyre actually happier than that. Its a relief, and a pleasure, to see him write a script that isnt rooted in neurosis, thats full of vibrant players who keep surprising us.
At least one of them, if you squint, might look like the Woody Allen character. That would be Alain (Niels Schneider), a self-deprecating fiction writer in a thrift-shop jacket, with an attitude of romantic savoir faire. In the opening scene, hes walking down a crowded street when he spots Fanny (Lou de Lage), a woman he knew casually back when they went to high school together in the U.S. Maybe he wasnt so casual: He was in love with her from afar. He doesnt take long to let her know this. But the actor, Niels Schneider, isnt doing some antic, wavy-armed French Woody Allen impersonation. Hes enthusiastic and trs cute, like a rumpled Justin Timberlake, which is why Fanny agrees to meet him for lunch. Well, maybe also because shes starting to have a doubt or two about her marriage.
Fanny was hitched once before (to another bohemian theyre her type), but he turned out to be a loser, and she allowed herself to be swept up into a wealthier echelon when she met Jean (Melvil Poupaud), a sharky businessman who treats her like a precious jewel. In the bad American version of this movie I kept imagining (at least, for a few scenes), Woody Allen would have cued us to see Jean as a possessive jerk. Hes certainly possessive, but Allen, writing his zestiest dialogue in years, also makes him intelligent and romantic: a cad, perhaps, but a dynamic and likable one. We can totally see why Fanny married him. How he makes his money, though, is a matter of some mystery (he tells her that he makes rich people richer), and theres a notorious story, one that was reported in the papers, about a business associate of Jeans who justdisappeared.
Fanny loves Jean, and enjoys her new luxe life, but shes a little out of sorts about it: the country hunting weekends she finds boring, all the chatter with his rich friends about money. She feels at home in Alains (rather spacious) bohemian apartment, and as soon as hes making her spaghetti there, they kiss. Their affair has begun, and its serious.
So serious that Fanny, suddenly taking long lunches, doesnt cover her tracks too well. Lou de Lage looks a lot like Rachel McAdams, and has a level-headed sensuality thats delicate and compelling. We can see that Fanny is truly torn; she doesnt quite know what shes doing, which is what lends drama to the affair. The other thing that lends drama to it is that Jean, a sly dog, can sense something is up. He hires a private detective to follow her, and the affair is uncovered in about three minutes. Jean is broken up. The question is: What is he going to do about it?
I will give it away (without giving away anything else and there are a lot of twists to come). He is going to hire the same thugs he got to kill off his business associate to murder Alain and make his body disappear into the Atlantic Ocean. No muss, no fuss. Why is this morbid twist the decision to snuff someone we like exhilarating? Precisely because its so dastardly. It doesnt play as a movie twist. It plays like someone in real life, or maybe someone out of a Patricia Highsmith novel, doing something unspeakable, the sort of act that makes our collective tabloid jaw drop. And that can be part of the power of movies.
But Coup de Chance, like Crimes and Misdemeanors and Match Point, is also a moral drama. It wants to weigh the consequences of Jeans action. Can he get away with murder? It sure looks like it. And what will the elimination of Alain do to his relationship with Fanny? Make it worse, or make it better? That answer, in a way, is part of how the film takes the measure of the crime.
The title of Coup de Chance means Stroke of Luck, and it refers to the theme of luck that snakes its way through the movie. Alain keeps insisting that all of life is luck. Jean says that there is no luck, that we make our own. The truth lies somewhere in between. And the way this plays out in the movie is absorbing, thrilling, and cheekily satisfying. The question that must now be asked is: Will Woody Allen get lucky with Coup de Chance? He has made what is easily his best movie since Blue Jasmine (10 years ago), maybe since Match Point (18 years ago). Its his 50th feature, and he is saying it may be his last. Should it be released in America? As a culture, I wouldnt be too surprised if we found ourselves debating whether the time has come to give Woody Allen, as a filmmaker, another coup de chance.