Slim ‘Chance’

Adultery is fatal in Woody Allen’s Coup de Chance, an uncluttered and uneven jealousy drama that contemplates the tension in every life between chance and will. Spoiler alert: the French title, Stroke of Luck, tips the film’s hand by tipping the scales in favor of the unexpected.    

A story of relationships haunted by the past, how gossip and speculation cast doubts on loved ones, and the ways in which dark twists of fate always lay beyond our control? Although Allen’s latest film plays like variations on the themes of his tabloid-plagued middle age and broadsheet-dissing dotage, Coup de Chance is no confessional—not that the once-adored, now-beleaguered and chronically-accused-yet-never-arrested auteur has anything to confess.

COUP DE CHANCE  ★★★ (3/5 stars)
Directed by: Woody Allen
Written by: Woody Allen
Starring: Lou de Laâge, Melvil Poupaud, Niels Schneider, Valérie Lemercier
Running time: 93 min

His 50th film as a writer-director is a return to form of sorts, in that he’s pivoting back to drama after a pair of fizzled comedies (the waterlogged Rainy Day in New York and the tittering trifle Rifkin’s Festival). But this rumination on the consequences of an affluent amoral murderer—set in France now that’s he’s persona non grata in American film circles—doesn’t quiet reach the peaks of previous career highs like Crimes and Misdemeanors or Match Point. At this point, the 88-year-old is only competing against himself. It’s rare to find him doing anything that he hasn’t already done better.

It’s also a bit mystifying—if naggingly on-brand—that Allen uses midcentury needle drop “Cantaloupe Island” along with long-expired legends like Art Farmer and the Modern Jazz Quartet as the soundtrack for two thirtysomething Parisian lovebirds circa 2024. Even if the music is non-diegetic, it’s not the type of score that nails a younger demographic like this one. Maybe they have old souls. Or maybe the director is stubbornly indifferent to the march of time.

 Fetching French actress Lou de Laâge plays the affluent Fanny Fournier, who deals in arts and antiquities at tony French auction house Artcurial and is married to financier Jean Fournier (Melvil Poupaud). She doesn’t quite understand Jean’s job, which he simply describes as adding to assets. “I made rich people richer,” he says. Is it legal? “Mostly,” he replies. Uh-oh. 

She’s a bored trophy wife—it’s the second marriage for both of them—so she’s quickly flattered when handsome former classmate Alain Aubert (Niels Schneider) runs into her on posh Avenue Montaigne. He’s now a published author and divorcé living the bohemian life in a modest attic apartment. He’s also a shameless flirt who keeps gushing over what a crush he had on Fanny back in college. She barely resists his overtures, and the two soon tumble into bed.  

Jean is charming enough, if a bit too fawning and possessive. He also has a room in their cavernous Paris apartment dedicated to an enormous electric train set where he obsesses over antique Märkin circuits like no one anywhere ever, outside of maybe geriatric hobbyists like Neil Young.  

He also dotes on Fanny’s dowdy mother Camille Moreau (Valérie Lemercier) and loves to take friends out to their country house for deer hunting—not that bringing a weapon into a drama like this would be portentous at all. Double-check that rifle bag, I think Chekhov might have left his gun.

Jean starts to suspect that Fanny has a lover, even as Fanny is wracked with guilt over her affair. But what is her choice, anyway? She can either be with a trigger-happy rich husband who plays with toys or a hunky lover with a boho sensibility and an affectation for doing his creative writing in longhand. Tough call. Sharping the film’s themes, Jean is a control freak while Alain blithely romanticizes serendipity. What could possibly go wrong? 

Coup de Chance is a simplistic sigh of a film, overwrought and underthought but still professionally executed with a workmanlike if uninspired mise-en-scene and obligingly glowing cinematography thanks to stalwart golden-hour fetishist Vittorio Storaro. As befits most cosmopolitan Allen films, the real estate porn is first-rate and the cast is uniformally good-looking. But the overall message rings hollow, and that felicitous fluke at the film’s climax is borderline silly. As he’s proven time and again, Allen is capable of better. He might still have another great film in him—if we’re lucky.