When Woody Allen talks about the directors he seeks to emulate, imitate, or merely copy from, the names he is likely to mention are Ingmar, Federico, and maybe Jean (as in Renoir). Notwithstanding his well-publicized penchant for the giants of midcentury European cinema, Allen also owes a major debt to a far less pretentious (and, in truth, a far more entertaining) filmmaker: Alfred Hitchcock.
No, Allen has never made a thriller centered on birds or a horror picture about a crossdressing killer. Yet, throughout his films, murder and thoughts of murder are surprisingly common. To wit, no fewer than five major Allen dramas center on protagonists who commit, or conspire to commit, murder and are able to justify the most horrible of crimes: Crimes and Misdemeanors, Match Point, Cassandra’s Dream, Irrational Man, and the new Coup de Chance. These films are artful and suspenseful in the Hitchcock manner.
Coup de Chance, Allen’s 50th film as writer-director (and, owing to his banishment from American moviemaking, his first in French), is perhaps the best example of what might be called the filmmaker’s Hitchcockian strain: It is a vivid, intelligent, and fairly merciless film in which a glamorous character does ungodly things to safeguard his lot in life. The movie received a limited theatrical release on April 5 by the small distributor MPI Media Group. And however far you have to travel to see it, do so.
Working for the fifth time with cinematographer Vittorio Storaro (The Conformist, Apocalypse Now), Allen asserts his command of the medium instantly in the opening shot: On an autumn afternoon in Paris, the camera follows from behind the graceful trot of young married auction gallery worker Fanny Fournier (Lou de Laage). She then hears herself beckoned from off-camera by a long-lost admirer from her past, Alain (Niels Schneider) — an accidental encounter that, in Allen’s theology of a random universe, is a bit of good fortune that turns into very, very bad fortune. Alain joins Fanny for an extended “walk-and-talk” shot — the two chat about school days and the book he is writing — that could have easily come straight from one of Allen’s classic romantic comedies of the 1970s.
Except this is not Annie Hall or Manhattan. Curiously, the fact that everyone is speaking French has a transformative effect on the Allen aesthetic: When read in subtitles, Allen’s dialogue suddenly sounds fresh and new. And, just as important, none of the people speaking it are tempted to imitate Woody, something that has been a problem with, for example, John Cusack in Bullets Over Broadway or Kenneth Branagh in Celebrity or Owen Wilson in Midnight in Paris. To this extent, exile has done Allen some good, and he is no less at home directing French-speaking actors than Francois Truffaut was directing English-speaking actors in Fahrenheit 451.
That being said, Fanny is a Woody Allen heroine by any standard definition of the term: pretty, moody, savvy, and discontent in her romantic life. In her case, this means her marriage to Jean (Melvil Poupaud), an aloof, allegedly brilliant businessman whose source of wealth remains mysterious. “I make money for people,” Jean tells his wife when she prods him. “That’s as simple as I can put it.” Although Jean clearly adores Fanny, we know that something is not quite right with him because of his incessant fiddling with an elaborate electric toy train display in their apartment. His obsession with the little choo-choo, winding its way through the fake hills and valleys, suggests someone who enjoys being in control and surveying the world beneath him.
Naturally, Fanny is primed for a relationship with Alain, one of those artist types who moves from city to city with his in-progress novel always under one arm. Even if Alain is a bit too La Boheme in his conception, Allen makes us fully comprehend Fanny’s fantasy of an alternate life: In just the latest example of what a graceful visual filmmaker Allen can be, there’s a lovely shot in which the camera slowly moves closer to Fanny as she is reclining on a sofa and looking pensive. The assorted assignations between Fanny and Alain have the desperate quality of Michael Caine’s furtive romance with Barbara Hershey in Hannah and Her Sisters.
No dummy, Jean correctly interprets the reason for his wife’s newfound distance and evasiveness, and this is where the film takes a startling turn: Jean enlists the services of a detective agency to follow Fanny. There’s a wonderful sequence in which a female detective stealthily takes camera-phone photos. When the verdict comes in, Jean recruits a pair of toughs to dispose of Alain. “It’s an ugly world, don’t you agree?” Jean says. “But when some people die, it automatically becomes better, a nicer place for everybody.” It’s a chilling sentiment, but one that Allen, for whatever reason, has some intuitive comprehension of: Such was the rationale behind the murders in Crimes and Misdemeanors and Match Point. The killings solved the characters’ problems.
It would be an altogether different sort of crime to tell more about the twists and turns to follow, including the role played by Fanny’s detective novel-reading mother Camille (Valerie Lemercier), whose bookishness and inquisitiveness make her the closest thing to an analog to Woody’s on-screen persona in this film. Suffice it to say that Allen makes full use of the French countryside during a climactic deer-hunting sequence. Storaro captures the feel of wet, decaying foliage in autumn, a metaphor for the rotting soul at the heart of the movie.
Coup de Chance translates to “stroke of luck” in English, and Allen clearly regards the developments in the story to be a potent illustration of the capricious nature of the world: You meet a lovely girl, and you end up in the crosshairs of her murderous-minded husband. Yet some might contend that the film’s shocking conclusion, bound to be entirely unexpected even by those following closely, makes a better argument for divine intervention than a universe governed by chance.
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Peter Tonguette is a contributing writer to the Washington Examiner magazine.