2023 Movie
Dir. Woody Allen · France, United Kingdom · French
A surprisingly fresh and very French comedy of errors (if cheating is indeed erroneous)
The humor, oh the humor! It’s a breath of fresh air to be laughing with a Woody Allen film and not at it. He is so good at capturing the cheekiness in meet-cutes, secrecies, and lies, all powdered with exaggerated Frenchness. Forgive my surprised tone, but Coup de Chance surpasses all expectations in the way it turns a rather banal plot into an entertaining game of cat and mouse, without overstepping the boundaries of good taste. In developing a story about female infidelity (or all infidelity, for that matter), one can be overly moralistic just to squeeze out laughs and empathy from the viewer, but Allen refrains from all those cheap tricks. His script is tight and at times ridiculously funny. Whether or not you get behind Fanny and her convoluted ways of seeking happiness, Coup de Chance will offer you plenty of instances to better understand the character in a constellation of other people, who are equally affected by her decisions. In a way, the film is a comedy of ethics as well — something the American director hasn’t successfully done in a long, long while.
Fanny and Jean have everything of an ideal couple: fulfilled in their professional life, they live in a magnificent apartment in the beautiful districts of Paris and seem to be in love as on the first day. But when Fanny crosses, by chance, Alain, a former high school friend, she is immediately capsized. They see each other again very quickly and get closer and closer.
"The movie, aesthetically as lumpy as a latke, nonetheless has a weird and lurid vigor that comes from an altogether different source: Allen’s pleasure in his own imagination—his delight in inventing the plot."
— Richard Brody
"A tight and effective French-language thriller that is also, among other things, the world’s longest mother-in-law joke."
— Glenn Kenny
A young woman bumps into her high school sweetheart on the streets of Paris, unsuspecting how much this encounter will influence her life and in particular, her successful and fulfilling marriage.
you can link it to Crimes and Misdemeanours or Match Point, aka the good ol' Woody-Allen-does-crime-movies, where lust is the driving force that causes people's downfall. In Coup de Chance, the setting is similar, with the unexpected affair between Fanny (Lou de Laâge) and her old fling Alain (Niels Schneider) blossoming in the shadow of a rather fulfilling marriage between her and her husband Jean (a fantastic Melvil Poupaud). Afraid of getting caught in the crossfires, Fanny sneaks around Parisian neighbourhoods for clandestine lunch break visits to Alain's apartment, but she's somehow convinced this is meant to be. As with many Woody Allen characters, she is a hopeless romantic and far away from the cynicism her beau exhibits; after all it's only natural to have a woman like her fall for a charming, but dorky writer in spite of her perfectly fitting marriage. That's the kind of thing that happens in an Allen film, but in this case, the delight of watching a comedy of errors unfold is way too big to deny that after all those years (and all those scandals and mediocre to badf films), he's still got something to give.
Thank God Woody Allen made a film without a neurotic alter ego of his.
Savina Petkova, PhD, is a Bulgarian film critic and curator based in London whose work has appeared in Sight and Sound, Variety, Little White Lies, Cineuropa, and MUBI Notebook. She is the Programming Lead for Cambridge Film Festival and a senior editor at Talking Shorts, with a focus on contemporary European cinema.