One autumn day in Paris, a struggling writer named Alain buys a lottery ticket for his married lover, Fanny. The purchase is made on impulse; it’s an offhand romantic gesture and a feeble appeal to the fates. The odds are stacked against these ill-starred lovers and their adulterous affair is surely bound for disaster. But the nights are drawing in and the only moment that counts is now. Being a writer, Alain has a tendency to quote poetry. He says, “We all get frozen in ice if we don’t act before winter comes.”
Closing in on his 88th birthday, Woody Allen likewise appears to be running out of time. His creative juices have flatlined, scandal has made him a pariah, and the Venice organisers drew fierce condemnation for even including him on the programme. And yet, undeterred, he’s still rolling the dice on his musing tales about happenstance and happy accidents, relocating to Europe and working with French actors, like a failing gambler who hopes that a new casino might bring a change in his fortunes. Obviously the lotto ticket’s a bust; that was simply too much to ask. The real shock, though, is the film. It turns out to be the best one he’s managed in a decade at least.
Fanny (Lou de Laâge), we’re told, was once a high-school bohemian. Now she’s wed to the odious Jean (Melvil Poupaud), a self-made millionaire whose chief passion is the train-set which occupies an entire room of their palatial home. She spends her time in posh auction rooms, attending cocktail receptions or hunting deer from the couple’s bucolic weekend retreat. Now, thanks to her dalliance with Alain (Niels Schneider), Fanny reconnects with a different (and woozily romanticised) side of Paris and starts browsing in second-hand bookshops and strolling through leaf-blown city parks. “My life would be so different if I hadn’t bumped into you on the street,” she declares. Inevitably, though, luck is not on their side. Boiling over with suspicion, Jean has already hired a private detective to trail his wife around town and it is at this point that the melancholic Coup de Chance prepares to jump the points and embark on a different, rather darker track.
The strong, credible performances oil the wheels during these clattering shifts of gear and serve to distract from its occasional moments of implausibility. Implicitly, they also invite us to turn a blind eye to some minor continuity errors. Coup de Chance’s action spans six months or so and yet the whole production seems to have been shot in the month of October aside from a brief exterior shot of the country house, where we’re suddenly thrown forward to high summer. By this point in the action, a murder plot has been hatched and the shooting party is in full swing. Everybody involved seems to have slightly lost their bearings.
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How Allen continues to conduct his career is obviously his business alone. But if he were ever minded to collect his winnings and quit the table, his 50th feature might be a decent film to go out on. Coup de Chance is variously funny and sad, energetic and easygoing; a stumbling but satisfying autumnal drama that wanders amid the fading light and the golden leaves. For good measure, Allen even throws in an ending which stirs the memory of the classic moose-hunting routine from his old 1960s standup days; a rueful, airy aside that serves to bring the man’s career full-circle.