Coup de Chance, review: Woody Allen gets lucky in Paris with his funniest film in years

Isn’t Woody Allen meant to be cancelled? Well – in Hollywood and on Twitter, maybe. But at the Venice Film Festival, not so much. When the 87-year-old director’s name appeared at the opening of his latest feature, the thousand-strong audience in the Sala Darsena erupted in applause – while an hour and half later, its closing credits were met with outright cheers.

Allen has found it increasingly hard to make films in the United States since December 2017, when his adoptive daughter Dylan Farrow asked in the Los Angeles Times why he’d been thus far spared by the #MeToo movement, despite her own 1992 allegation of sexual abuse. (The allegation has been repeatedly denied by Allen, rebutted by Farrow’s sibling Moses, and was investigated at the time, with no charges brought.)

Europe has continued to work with him, however. Shortly before the pandemic he shot Rifkin’s Festival in San Sebastián, Spain, then late last year made his 50th, titled Coup de Chance, in Paris, with a French-speaking cast.

The result doesn’t quite merit the whooping that greeted it, but it’s certainly Allen’s best and funniest film since 2016’s Café Society: a baroquely extended mother-in-law joke, seasoned with details that may be conscious or unconscious swipes at his own late-life travails. Given the prominent role played by an electric train set in Farrow’s descriptions of the alleged incident since 2014, for instance, it seems notable that an extremely elaborate one is the most prized possession of Jean, the villain of the piece.

Played with sharply tailored insouciance by Melvil Poupaud, he’s a successful wealth manager whose younger trophy wife Fanny (Lou de Laage) has a chance encounter on the streets of Paris with Niels Schneider’s Alain – a bookish admirer from her university days, and Allen’s latest obvious self-insert.

An affair ensues, suspicious Jean hires a private detective and revenge is violently exacted – though not before Fanny’s wily mother (Valérie Lemercier, sporting Annie Hall-ish hair and glasses) begins to grasp what’s afoot. Elsewhere, Allen – sorry, Alain – shuffles around an unusually orange Paris (cinematographer Vittorio Storaro cranks up the autumnal palette), cooks his lover spaghetti and meatballs, and monologues about the role played by luck in determining the course of our lives.

The themes and ideas here are familiar from Allen’s ropey 2005 London-set thriller Match Point, but while the local colour might sometimes feel just as tin-eared here (in a restaurant, characters order foie gras and frogs’ legs), it proves a far brighter, more pleasurable watch.

Perhaps the translation process helped to sharpen the screenplay – Allen has said he allowed his actors to rephrase their lines as they saw fit – or perhaps the premise is just better suited to comedy, with Jean’s efforts to put a stop to the affair and his mother-in-law’s snoopings becoming ever more ludicrous. An 11th-hour twist allows dumb luck the last laugh, and (in Venice, at least) it brought the house down. Given his otherwise grim recent form, Allen himself may have simply got lucky with this one, but the charm and sparkle here are real.

Cert tbc, 93 mins. Screening at the Venice Film Festival. A UK release has yet to be announced.