Movie Review: ‘Coup de Chance,’ by Woody Allen

There was a time when the release of virtually any Woody Allen movie would be enough to lure me into a theater. But I began to feel queasy after the messy fallout from his relationship with Mia Farrow, over three decades ago. I became even more reluctant in the last decade, as his films grew wispier and less original.

When the MeToo movement made it harder for Allen to line up stateside investors and outlets for his work, he looked abroad for countries that asked fewer questions about filmmakers’ private lives. He settled on France (home to Roman Polanski, whose legal and ethical difficulties with young women have been even worse than Allen's).

As a result, the Brooklyn native has gone far beyond merely filming in France with a largely English-speaking crew (as occurred with Midnight in Paris). Instead, he has directed an entirely Francophone set of film professionals—and without knowing any French.

So I paid scant attention last year, when Coup de Chance was pulled from the Cannes Film Festival for fear that allegations that Allen had molested stepdaughter Dylan Farrow in 1992 would distract attention from the artistic merits of the entire lineup. 

Though it eventually premiered at the Venice Film Festival last September, viewers did not have a chance to see it stateside until this spring, either streaming or in selected theaters. Start-to-finish subtitles didn't help in breaking out to a wider audience.

(I saw it at the Barrymore Film Center, a haven for revival, art-house, and independent cinema aficionados like me in Bergen County, NJ. You would be very lucky to see it anywhere else; it has come and gone in selected theaters in the blink of an eye.)

Predictably, Allen’s notoriety has colored how his new film would be perceived even before most people have had a chance to look at it. “Did he have any 13-year-old girls in it?” a close relative snickered. (The answer: no.)

Coup de Chance, translated into English as “Stroke of Luck,” counterparts the different attitudes toward fate held by the two men who vie for the love of Fanny (played by Lou de Laâge), a beautiful auction house worker: Her middle-aged husband Jean (played by Melvil Poupaud) believes there is no such thing as luck, and his own status—an affluent financial adviser who won the hand of Fanny—seems proof enough for him.

In contrast, the writer Alain (played by Niels Schneider) has encountered Fanny years after developing a crush on her while they were high school classmates in New York. His spontaneity and openness to experience appeal to the long-dormant bohemian instincts of Fanny, who has become bored with the carefully scheduled urban parties and country weekends of Jean.

Much of the film contains the kind of quiet foreboding (e.g., Jean’s love for hunting, and the mysterious fate of his onetime partner) that also characterized Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors and Match Point. 

With few of the memorable lines that fill so much of Allen's other work, I grew concerned that he might be simply regurgitating motifs from these earlier entries in what might be called his “Desire, Murder and Guilt” trilogy.

Even within this film, Allen repeats images and references, as if he didn’t want the least attentive viewer to overlook any symbolism.

Once wishes that Allen might have worked with a collaborator on the screenplay, as he did with Marshall Brickman on Sleeper, Annie Hall, and Manhattan, to rescue him from such redundancy, as well as various implausible plot developments.

But, though the screenplay doesn’t glitter, the production moves nimbly, carried along by the cinematography of Vittorio Storaro, the highly competent French cast, and Herbie Hancock’s cool, understated jazz standard “Cantaloupe Island.” 

And the ending still goes to show that Allen, long fascinated with magicians, still knows how to pull a welcome surprise on audiences.

Coup de Chance may well be the last film that Allen completes. Though he told Roger Friedman, in an April interview, that he has two other projects just waiting for someone to finance it, he does not seem to be pressing hard for it.

If this 50^th film in his nearly six-decade career onscreen does turn out to be Allen’s finale, it’s not a bad one to bow out on. Against the odds, he’s come up with a French souffle counterpart to Crimes and Misdemeanors and Match Point: light, delicate, and sensual.

Quote of the Day (Mary Rodgers, on Woody Allen and His First Wife)

“At 22, Woody [Allen] looked about 12 but was already the inventive weirdo he would become famous as a decade later. His wife, Harlene, who made extra money typing scripts for the office, was even nerdier, but only inadvertently funny. She looked, and sounded, a bit like Olive Oyl, with reddish hair, freckles, and a bad case of adenoids. Woody, whenever he wasn’t working on his sketches — his best that summer was about a man-eating cake — was either sitting on a wooden chair on the porch outside the barracks, practicing his clarinet, or inside with her, practicing sex, possibly from a manual. He was doing better, it seemed, with the clarinet.”—Once Upon a Mattress composer Mary Rodgers (1931-2014), on Woody Allen and his first wife, in Shy: The Alarmingly Outspoken Memoirs of Mary Rodgers, written by Mary Rodgers and Jesse Green (2022)

Quote of the Day (Woody Allen, on the Keaton Females)

“We [Allen and Diane Keaton] never fought and would work together many times in the future. In time I dated her beautiful sister, Robin, and we had a brief romance. After that I dated her other beautiful sister, Dory, and we had a little fling. The three Keaton sisters were all beautiful, wonderful women. Good genes in that family. Award-winning protoplasm. Great-looking mother.”—Writer-director-actor Woody Allen, Apropos of Nothing: Autobiography (2020)

It seems that there’s a movie that Mr. Allen never quite got around to making. It would have been called “Woody Does Diane And Her Sisters.” And let’s not even talk about Mrs. Robinson—I mean Mrs. Keaton.

Please excuse me while I barf now…

Photo of the Day: Brouhaha Over Broadway

Late yesterday afternoon, on my way home from work, I took this shot of the crowd milling outside Broadway’s St. James Theatre for the premiere of the musical comedy, Bullets Over Broadway. If the mood out here involved anticipating that night’s performance, though, I suspect that nervousness dominated inside, starting with playwright Woody Allen.

America’s most famous neurotic could be expected to be at least a bit skittish, especially since none of his work had opened on the Great White Way since 1969. Now, the difficulties had grown exponentially (or, at least, what a world-class neurotic would think of it as “exponentially,” anyway). All of a sudden, just before the opening, gossip was spreading about a closing number that the cast supposedly couldn’t stand…about no African-American actor having a role as a gangster, despite the fact that much of the action was set in the Cotton Club…about how Allen, with his detailed notes, was usurping the role of director Susan Stroman…and oh, that continuing talk about that 20-year-old sex scandal.

Then, this morning, it was all over. The reviews ranged from mildly skeptical (The New York Times’ Ben Brantley) to laudatory (USA Today). The consensus seemed to be that The Woodman didn’t have a Hindenburg-style disaster, anyway.

It looks as if Allen has dodged a bullet—or, in keeping with his title, a hail of them.

Lawyers, Guns and Woody: A Family and Film Post-Mortem

Nancy (played by Sheila Sullivan): “My lawyer will call your lawyer.”

Allan Felix (played by Woody Allen): “I don't have a lawyer. Have him call my doctor.”—Woody Allen, Play It Again, Sam (1969)

Earlier this week marked the 45^th anniversary of the premiere of Play It Again, Sam, which represented Woody Allen’s only appearance as an actor on a Broadway stage. I thought that the lines in the comedy that established the template of his character on film in the early 1970s—inept, timid, helpless with women, and all the more endearing for all of that—would appear ironic in light of his more recent rocky love life. But I never thought that a line on the law might become newly relevant. As it happens, neither a lawyer nor a doctor can cure what ails him now.

Warren Zevon fans know the line that follows the reprise of his 1970s gonzo song, “Lawyers, Guns and Money”:  “The shit has hit the fan.” For Allen, no other line captures the true nature of his wrangling with former lover Mia Farrow. 

In the early 1990s, a one-word tabloid headline—inevitably, “BANANAS”—was perfectly adequate in summarizing how Allen was discovered to have taken naked photos of Farrow’s adopted daughter, Soon-Yi Previn; how Allen, who had never married Farrow, went on to wed Soon-Yi; and how, amid the resulting suit and countersuit over custody of children Dylan and Satchel (later Ronan), child-molestation accusations were hurled against the filmmaker.

The latest upheaval, however, is of an entirely different magnitude. Just a few months before a musical adaptation of his 1994 film Bullets Over Broadway appears on the Great White Way, only three weeks after a lifetime achievement award at the Golden Globes presented by frequent co-star Diane Keaton, Allen now faced something different: a party not heard from two decades ago. Adopted daughter Dylan Farrow alleged, in an open letter to The New York Times (published by family friend and that paper’s columnist, Nicholas Kristof), the nature of the abuse suffered at his hands when she was seven years old.

That wasn’t the only aspect of the situation that was new. This time, the child, now grown, put on the spot those who had gone on to work with Allen more recently. It made many people mighty uncomfortable.

Cate Blanchette, by all accounts a lovely person, looked distinctly pained when asked about being called out on her working relationship with Allen, and, as you might expect, spoke of the family’s “long and painful situation.”

Alec Baldwin, also true to form, was more vitriolic, in a tweet to a fan pressing him for a response: “What the f@% is wrong w u that u think we all need to b commenting on this family’s personal struggle? You are mistaken if you think there is a place for me, or any outsider, in this family’s issue.  USA is supposed to be THE place where you get a fair trial. Can a fair trial be conducted w everyone’s tired opinions on the internet? Americans have fallen victim to a sanctimony about things they know little about. You don’t ‘defend’ either party. You defend due process.”

Despite the difference in tone, the Blue Jasmine co-stars shared a subtext: Leave me alone, okay? This is a family matter. This is way too complicated for me, an actor, to make judgments.  As if reading their minds, an artful flack at Sony Pictures Classics, the distributor of Allen’s recent well-received films Blue Jasmine and Midnight in Paris, noted in a press release: “This is a very complicated situation and a tragedy for everyone involved.”

“Complicated.” Hmmm…for all their undoubted intelligence, these individuals, like so many of their other brothers and sisters in the profession, simply don’t understand that the word “complicated” does not apply to Allen’s situation. Nor do a couple of other “C” words. Really, there is only one that, indisputably, works.

But let’s consider first why “complicated” doesn’t apply. Complicated is onetime Los Angeles Dodger great Steve Garvey getting two women pregnant while marrying a third. (It's also irresponsibly stupid, but that's another matter.) In the case of many people who are getting divorced, complicated might involve two people, already with families, engaging in an extramarital affair. In terms that the Woodman might understand, taking up with a sister-in-law—as Michael Caine’s character did, in Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters—is very complicated. (I bet he would agree that the same description might apply to Mia Farrow’s close relationship with ex Frank Sinatra, which—judging from her recent Vanity Fair admission that son Ronan might “possibly” have been the singer’s offspring—crossed the line into intimacy, nearly two decades after their divorce.)   

Crass doesn’t even describe the actor-hyphenate’s relationship with the Farrows. That adjective best applies to a one-liner in his nightclub days about Harlene Rosen, whom he had divorced: “My first wife lives on the Upper West Side and I read in the paper the other day that she was violated on her way home—knowing my first wife, it was not a moving violation.”

Even the word criminal, used by both Allen’s allies and critics, isn’t relevant—at least, not now. Even if Allen did molest Dylan Farrow two decades ago, the statute of limitations has expired, so he currently faces no criminal liability from that act or any others of a similar nature occurring before it.

No, I’m afraid that the appropriate word for Allen’s predicament--his conduct, really--is creepy. I’m not even talking here strictly about the age difference between Ali, 57 years old at the time, and Soon-Yi (somewhere between 19 and 21), when their relationship was disclosed. (Among movie moguls and captains of industry, a much younger woman attached to an older woman is known as a “trophy wife.”) 

No, Allen had an affair with, then married, the adopted daughter of his longtime lover and mother of two other children he had adopted with Farrow. Even Los Angeles Times writer Robin Abcarian, who several weeks ago cautioned against a rush to public judgment about the case, also exactly summarized what Allen had done in this instance: “That is moral, if not legal, incest.”

(Or, as Phil Hartman’s Frank Sinatra told Dana Carvey’s Woody Allen, in a great Saturday Night Live skit about the affair at the time:  "Listen here, Wood-man: I know how it feels to want to trade up, but you gotta keep your hands off the kinder!")

Allen, famously in psychoanalysis for 30 years, stopped going after his marriage to Soon-Yi. Evidently, all that time on the couch never made him aware that sleeping with (and wedding) the adopted daughter of your lover is, as the judge deciding the custody battle between Allen and Farrow wrote, “grossly inappropriate.”

All Allen seems to have learned is a statement he issued when news of the affair broke: “The heart wants what it wants.” It is, of course (a phrase used by the filmmaker, in his open letter to the New York Times last week denying Dylan Farrow’s accusations), not his heart that was primarily responsible for the unresisted impulse to sleep with a woman who, by age and relationship, could not have been less appropriate for him.

In Allen’s 1988 Bergmanesque drama, Another Woman, the cardiologist Ken responds to a wife’s accusations of adultery on two separate occasions using the exact same, almost practiced speech: “I realize that you’ve been hurt, and if I’ve done anything wrong I’m sorry. I accept your condemnation.”

Screenwriter Allen condemns Ken as self-involved and heartless. In fact, whatever the truth about Allen and Dylan, his own role in tearing apart the Farrow family is not less so. Count the casualties: Soon-Yi, cut off from her family; brother Moses, who has taken Woody's side in the fracas; Ronan, no longer speaking to the man he regards (correctly) as his father and brother-in-law; and Dylan, either a pawn in a lover's quarrel (Allen's version) or a victim of horrible abuse (Dylan's and Mia's). In fact, Allen doesn’t accept any responsibility for the turmoil and hurt his lack of impulse control has caused over two decades. 

Two years ago, asked during a round of interviews for Midnight in Paris about his past notoriety, he responded, “What was the scandal? I fell in love with this girl, married her. We have been married for almost 15 years now. There was no scandal, but people refer to it all the time as a scandal and I kind of like that in a way because when I go I would like to say I had one real juicy scandal in my life."

In a way, it is understandable that so many people have continued to work with Allen over the past two decades. They can say, truthfully, that he was never charged with molesting Dylan (though the district attorney in the case has stated that this was due at the time to the massive difficulties involved with having the child testify). It is also the case that one would never work on a film or play again if one found objectionable any of the following as co-workers: not just child molesters, but also wife- and husband-stealers, raging drunks, drug peddlers, bodyguards and private investigators who act like organized-crime associates, financial chiselers, producers whose self-importance exceeds their duties, and bullying directors, any one of whom is likely to be associated with a production of any size. In fact, the only thing that might make people treat you like a disease carrier in Hollywood is if you make movies that lose a ton of money--a fate that Allen has avoided.

But Dylan Farrow, in effect, has not only called out all those who have worked with Allen, but all those (including myself) who have continued to watch his films. We may have been troubled, even shocked, at the time, but nothing was ever proven, all the facts in the case seemed to fade away, and, like a Presidential scandal of that decade, many regarded this as a "personal" matter from which everyone would be better off if all would just "move on." 

Now the allegations have been given greater force. Some fans who continued to patronize his films might snub his work completely from now on. Others will be more reluctant to part with their cash on such a man.

Possibly two of the darkest works in Allen's considerable filmography, Crimes and Misdemeanors and Match Point, involve men who seemingly get away with their offenses--not just in the eyes of the law, but even from a god whose existence they cannot recognize. They are left, in the end, with a private emptiness. Perhaps, despite the late-life acclaim and public denials of anything wrong, Allen feels the same moral vacuum. 

You wish, at the final credits, that it could all be resolved with "I've Heard That Song Before," the bouncy entry from the Great American Songbook that he used in Hannah and Her Sisters. But I'm afraid that, for the duration, we'll be left with the storm und drang of Zevon, in the cacophony of tweets, journalists, critics, publicists, and lawyers.