Coup de Chance excuses infidelity as no big deal.
The opening scenes of Woody Allen’s Coup de Chance (his first film made in French) are dreamlike. Film-buff references to Jacques Prévert, Jean Renoir, Éric Rohmer, and Jean Anouilh’s L’Alouette land differently than his early spoofs of Antonioni and Fellini did. This time, Allen doesn’t seem to be spoofing his betters; it’s reverie. And the nature of this subconscious escape is lovely: As American girl Fanny Moreau (Lou de Laâge) encounters her New York schoolmate Alain (Niels Schneider), the Eiffel Tower looms in the distance, an apparition calling up the masterpieces Rules of the Game, Funny Face, Rendez-vous in Paris. Otherwise, the couple’s awkward, stammering meet-cute is pure Woody Allen.
Allen was always a superficial filmmaker who could come up with solid, memorable jokes. In Coup de Chance, it’s a cocktail-party scene where a gathering of Parisienne snobs discuss Fanny’s trophy-wife marriage to mysterious financial wiz Jean (Éric Rohmer heartthrob Melvil Poupaud); they smirkily conclude, “Thank God for gossip. Otherwise we’d have to deal with facts.”
That’s the wittiest line in Allen’s 51st film. Coup de Chance (Stroke of Luck), paced to Nat Adderley and Milt Jackson jazz, expresses the desperation of Allen’s exile from the American film industry (his previous film, A Rainy Day in New York, was never released in the U.S.). The familiar white urban haut bourgeois setting is the same as that New York lifestyle once consecrated in the 1980s by the New York Times, now transferred to contemporary France, where Allen’s old dream — his American arriviste status — turns to nightmare.
The familiar plot (Fanny cheats on Jean with Alain, and Jean retaliates) resembles Allen’s previous efforts in middle-class duplicity. He was the least reliable chronicler of modern morality in such movies as Manhattan, Husbands and Wives, and Celebrity that justified adultery and faithlessness. (“The heart wants what it wants,” as Allen famously said about his relationship with Mia Farrow’s adopted daughter.) Eventually, the horrible New Yorkers whom Allen celebrated turned against him. (It’s the same audience that celebrated gentrification in Hannah and Her Sisters and who gasped covetously at scenes of Mayfair luxe in his 2005 European-set escape, Match Point.)
Coup de Chance doesn’t confront that hypocrisy, which is why it fails, despite its promising beginning. I expected that gossip/facts line to clarify Allen’s objection to the hypocrisy that beset his culture-hero status and led to his disgrace in the movie industry. But it seems that Allen learned nothing from the horrific personal experience of social obloquy. Coup de Chance sloppily depicts Fanny’s infidelity.
Lacking European sophistication, Allen still excuses infidelity as no big deal despite the fact that others hold it against you while indulging their own sins. The film’s title alludes to curly-haired Alain’s optimistic belief in good fortune, a contrast to Jean’s saying “I make my own luck.” But the pithy contradiction shows that Allen is incapable of a European’s moral complexity, although he was enticed by it and admired it. (Fanny descends a circular staircase like the one that signified the transition of upper-class rules through middle-class bureaucracy in Max Ophuls’s The Earrings of Madame de… .)
Allen also evokes Jean Renoir’s adulterous roundelay The Rules of the Game (widely considered the greatest film of all time) during Fanny’s country outing, when Jean indulges his taste for deer-hunting. But the mechanisms of Allen’s awful plotting (skipping the “luck” of Fanny’s potential pregnancy and a scene in which Jean’s suspiciousness is paralleled on a crowded Parisian street) evokes the terrible Crimes and Misdemeanors, the most morally deficient of all Allen’s movies — its title has become meaningless these days.
I wanted Allen to come back strong like other persecuted public figures have — like the merciless, hilarious Deconstructing Harry — to defy his hypocritical naysayers by turning moral irony against them. Instead, the second-wittiest joke of Coup de Chance is Alain seducing Fanny in his struggling-artist garret. He mentions La Bohème, but it’s actually an expansive, sunlit, multi-roomed loft — the kind that American expatriates envied in Whit Stillman’s The Cosmopolitans and not so different from the Match Point penthouse that aroused reviewers to audible ecstasy.
Something about Allen’s own unexamined ambition prevents him from empathizing with Poupaud’s sensitively portrayed Jean. Poupaud’s sense of betrayal is palpable, like that of the cuckolds who sought private detectives in Truffaut’s Stolen Kisses and Chabrol’s La Rupture. Meanwhile, Fanny and her snooping mother (Valérie Lemercier) are shallow, almost cartoonish, while Jean, who “makes people rich,” is only half-realized. He retreats into his own solipsistic world-building, with an elaborate vintage Marklin toy train set resembling the mechanical gadgets the Marquis (Marcel Dalio) played with in Rules of the Game. His pathetic anger parallels Allen’s regrettable career trajectory.
The superficiality of these urban sophisticates should sting, but it hurts less than it ought because Allen merely evokes the superior films that ignited his culture-vulture leanings, fooling American gatekeepers for a while. In Coup de Chance, cultural appropriation isn’t enough. Allen’s cinematic dream becomes a morally dubious nightmare.