Give Coup de Chance a Real Chance
Woody Allen's 50th feature as writer/director is joyous, clever, human and quick-moving
This week, thanks to distributor MPI and courageous independent theaters like The Quad Cinema in New York City, Woody Allen’s film Coup de Chance enjoyed a U.S. theatrical release in a baker’s dozen theaters around the country. In New York small theaters were crowded with enthusiastic moviegoers who applauded Woody Allen’s writer/director credit at the start and again at the end of the bossa nova-scored delight.
The film debuted last year at the Venice Film Festival where it received enthusiastic reviews and reactions from European audiences. It is acted entirely in French, with English subtitles, a feat that Allen last performed during the Italian cinema parody sequences in Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex.
Because the story involves an affair and a murder, it’s being compared to Allen’s 80s masterpiece, Crimes and Misdemeanors and his 21st century success with Match Point. But I don’t think Coup de Chance really relates to either. Those movies were novelistic (especially C&D) while Coup de Chance hits like short fiction. It’s not really a story about murder or infidelity, it is a story, as the title tells us, about luck and the role it plays in our lives.
Crimes explores the boundaries of what we can get away with through the story of a wealthy doctor whose mistress threatens to expose his affair, ruining his marriage and damaging his standing in society. The doctor, played by Martin Landau, solves the problem by employing his criminally-connected brother to untraceably kill her. The question of the movie is familiar to any reader of the existentialists — it’s about whether the doctor can live with himself, celebrated at home as a loving father and by New York City’s donor class as an esteemed humanitarian, when the truth is that he is somebody who disposes of inconvenient people as if they are garbage.
The question of Coup de Chance is about how much we can control our lives. Fannie Fournier, a Parisian woman who works for an auction house, has a wealthy second—husband named Jean, who purports to be some sort of financial adviser or fixer but is actually involved in some rough business. On her way to work, Fannie runs into Alain a classmate from high school who is also divorced and who describes his enduring crush on Fannie, which has persisted since their adolescences. This chance encounter leads to an affair.
Alain, a writer, is delighted by this. The theme of the novel he is writing is luck. Just by virtue of having been born, he argues, we are all winners of a cosmic lottery, since the chance of the universe manifesting any one of us, as we are, is infinitely small.
Jean takes the opposite view of luck. He doesn’t believe in it, fate or destiny. “You make your own luck,” he says. As the film unfolds, we see that his life is a pattern of doing exactly that.
In the Allen cinematic universe, the role of will in human affairs is often minimized and his characters are driven by desires that they don’t choose and cannot deny. This makes them particularly vulnerable to fate and probability because, confronted with wanting, these people are barely able to contain themselves. Life is, in Allen’s world, a series of driving passions.
More than anything, Allen’s view of people as subject to their desires is what keeps him at odds with contemporary mass culture, which no longer sees the human psyche in terms of buried Freudian impulses and needs. An example: when I was at Forbes, a writer filed an arcticle to an editor friend of mine with the headline, “What To Do If You Start Crying At Work.” The editor highlighted the writer’s 800 words of text beneath the title and replaced them with one word: “Stop.” But to Allen, the person who cries at work cannot be told to summon the will to stop. They are, deep down, the kind of person who cries under duress. To blame them for it is almost obscene.
If I say to you that I am falling in love with the adopted daughter of my long-time romantic partner, you will likely say, “Do not do that. Do not let yourself have those feelings.” When it happened to Allen, he said “The heart wants what it wants.” Some people think he was being glib. He was not. To Allen, love is something that happens to you, not something that can be changed. In Romeo and Juliet, the lives of two young people from families on opposite sides of a blood feud would go far better if they could just not fall in love with each other. But there’s no choice to be made. Telling Romeo and Juliet not to be in love with each other makes as much sense as telling your febrile neighbor to just stop having the flu.
The ethos of the psychoanalytic culture that Allen represents is all about uncovering and understanding hidden wants and from there it’s a short step towards acting on them. But our culture demands the repression of deep psychological impulses and the indulgence only of those that serve some commercial purpose. It’s fine to buy an iPhone and to stare at it for hours but risky to tell dirty jokes in public. No wonder Woody, when asked about “cancel” culture, quipped: “If you're going to be cancelled, this is the culture that you want to be cancelled from. Because who wants to be part of this culture?"
Allen is a truly dissident artist who has been thumbing his nose at American culture for decades. He got his start on television and in Hollywood but quickly decided he wanted to make different kinds of movies, with a sensibility all his own while more commercial filmmakers found themselves having to collaborate with MBAs and focus groups. Allen even found the notion of a laugh track offensive and many of his characters from Annie Hall, Manhattan and Bullets Over Broadway to Celebrity and Midnight in Paris, are writers struggling between the need to make money as commercial artists and the art they yearn to create.
For his part, Allen knew that he could be an independent film maker, if he kept his budgets small. If you want to make Avengers: Endgame for $350 million, you can bet that an army of “stakeholders” will want to have a say in your artistic process and certainly the outcome. The budget for Coup de Chance is less than $10 million. The lower financial stakes give Allen a great deal of leeway and control and it means that he can make a profit without relying on American audiences. Heck, the studios can’t even rely on the U.S. for profit anymore. They have to make sure their films can also sell in China, and that means kowtowing to its state censors, another thing the iconoclastic Allen would never do.
Like his characters, who fall in love even when it’s inconvenient or dangerous, Allen makes movies and writes stories because he is compelled. If The New Yorker is no longer home to his short humor, he finds The New Criterion. If he cannot finance a film in the U.S., he goes to Europe. If U.S. distributors won’t touch it, he doesn’t care because American moviegoing has lost much of the romance he remembers from his youth. If he has to make a film in French to tell the story he wants to tell, he does it.
Allen is remarkably unstoppable, and that’s a great quality. He follows his heart unapologetically in life and art. I think that’s a challenge to a lot of people who lack the courage or ability to do the same. Allen has never apologized for having a different aesthetic, one which challenged his audiences to expand their horizons, and he has never apologized for living an unconventional life, either. That so many people believe the worst and most preposterous claims about him seems like a rebuke of his insistence on being himself, uncompromisingly, all the time. It’s as if he got away with something when he’s really just a man who has refused to play by the rules of a game that he hadn’t signed up for in the first place.
