Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Coup de Chance’ on VOD, Woody Allen’s 50th (And Final?) Feature Film

Be warned: Coup de Chance (now streaming on VOD services like Amazon Prime Video) is the newest chapter in the Woody Allen Cinematic Universe, which is full of tiresome people endowed with superhuman pomposity and self-absorption. The 88-year-old filmmaker’s scandal-ridden personal life – to be egregiously brief, his alleged molestation of a very young Dylan Farrow and his marriage to his stepdaughter Soon-Yi Previn; judge for yourself or separate art from artist if you wish – has always percolated in the background of his career, but it’s at a full boil in the post-#MeToo world. And that finds him exiled from Hollywood, directing a French-language dramedy with an all-French cast, a movie that’s only notable for the notoriety of its maker. It’s also a movie that finds Allen’s once-charming storytelling attributes growing alarmingly stale.

COUP DE CHANCE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Fanny (Lou de Laage) walks to work, where she, of course, oversees high-end art auctions. Alain (Niels Schneider), a writer of course, strolls the very same street and turns heel as soon as he sees Fanny. They attended the same school in New York City years prior. She remembers him but he really remembers her – he had a major crush on her and isn’t afraid to say it now. What are the chances that they’d meet here on the streets of Paris, so far from where they first knew each other? Slim, I’d say. Slim as the Jim in the bucket on the bodega checkout counter. Problem is, she’s happily married to Jean (Melvil Poupaud), a gent described by one character as “delightfully solvent,” and whose solvency is tied to some nebulous financial chicanery that even his wife doesn’t understand. It involves “making rich people richer,” and all this adds up to the type of person Woody Allen effing hates, so this is our villain, and we should hate him too. 

Anyway, Alain is writing a novel that he says is all about irony and coincidence, and he lives in a charmingly quaint loft apartment, and all this is Allen telling us that this guy is great, the salt of the earth, a real keeper. Alain talks Fanny into having lunch with him, and despite her marital status, he flatters her by going on and on about how beautiful and smart she is. And she is, indeed, beautiful and smart, because we have eyes and ears that notice these things, just as all the characters in the movie also notice these things, because it seems like all they talk about is how beautiful and smart she is. They also gossip about Jean, because in his pre-Fanny life, his business partner disappeared under mysterious circumstances, and he benefited greatly from it. Hmm. Jean and Fanny half-joke about how she’s his trophy wife, and considering he frets over her the way she looks while she’s on his arm at fancy shindigs and always dictates that they spend their weekends in their ivy-covered country manse so he can shoot guns at woodland creatures despite her boredom with such excursions, that tells us it’s at least 51 percent not a joke. Again: Jean robs his wife of some of her autonomy and he kills animals, and is therefore a straw man Allen props up so he can figuratively whale on him with a shillelagh, or stab dozens of times with a cheese knife.

Those of us who’ve seen too many Woody Allen films will be shocked, SHOCKED, to learn that Fanny and Alain soon begin “having an affair,” a phrase that, like “making love,” nobody says anymore unless they’re in a Woody Allen movie. If you ate a small lump of brie every time the word “affair” occurs in the dialogue, you’d look like Jabba the Hutt by the end of the movie. Fanny talks and thinks about the affair constantly and ends up acting all jittery and neurotic and is on edge at work and at home, and might almost be figuring out that Jean isn’t such a nice guy, even though her mother Camille (Valerie Lemercier) goes on and on about how great and rich he is. Jean notices her change in tone and behavior, so he hires a private detective to confirm his suspicion: She’s having an affair! And that’s when Jean talks to a couple of thuggish-looking guys who hang out in a boxing gym, and although these aren’t the type of guys he normally associates with – they aren’t rich guys trying to get richer – it sure seems like he’s worked with them before. 

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Several dozen other Woody Allen movies, unfortunately. Its intellectuals-in-infidelity pseudo-comedy stuff is reminiscent of forgettable titles like Anything Else or You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, and its dramatic-thriller components draft on the goodwill of Match Point or Crimes and Misdemeanors.

Performance Worth Watching: De Laage shows significant screen presence, but the material often feels too broad and obvious for her to find much subtlety or nuance.

Memorable Dialogue: Jean speaks the subtext out loud: “I don’t believe in irony, or chance. And I have no respect for people who count on luck. There is no such thing as luck. We make our luck.”

Sex and Skin: Nah.

Our Take: There are no romanticized shots of Paris landmarks or old-world cityscapes in this movie – a sign that Coup de Chance is no Midnight in Paris. It foreshadows the plot’s eventual dark turn, a tonal shift from light and airy to deadly serious. And the shift almost works; the film might have benefitted from a more drastic alteration of tone instead of the soupy blandness Allen ladles out. The story begins like far too many of the filmmaker’s features, with people who think they’re happily married until some attractive sort happens across the protagonist’s path and gives them another think to think about. And it ends on a note of grim contemplation of a theme Allen’s explored many times before: the inexplicable collision of irony, fate, happenstance.

To be frank, this is the usual Allen shit. He’s been making this movie over and over again for years. The characters are neurotic Allen archetypes – his characters are always upper-middle-class artists, never bartenders or office managers or janitors – who babble on and on about poems as they sip expensive wine or pose in front of walls and walls of books books books. (Anyone else exhausted by pretentious Allen dialogue like, “Marcel wrote a very good book about Gaugin!”?)  Some filmmakers might hone their variations on a theme to a fine point, but this effort from Allen is mushy and lifeless. 

Unlike the filmmaker’s more inspired efforts, the comedy in Coup de Chance is a nonstarter, the drama rote, the characters suffering from serious plausibility issues (especially Fanny, whose demeanor changes at the drop of a plot point). I can say I was intrigued to see how the story shook out, since it keys on a mother-in-law bit that’s at once ridiculous and ancient but also slyly funny (does Fanny’s mother read too many detective novels? Of course she does!). But the hamfisted execution of the climax hews so tightly to Allen’s overwrought quasi-intellectual themes, it inspires derisive laughter. I’m pretty sure that wasn’t his intention.

Our Call: On top of all this, Coup de Chance is an onerous bore. SKIP IT. 

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.