Twelve years after Midnight in Paris, Woody Allen returns to the French capital for Coup de Chance, his new film and first shot entirely in French. Starring Lou de Laâge, Niels Schneider, Melvil Poupaud and Valérie Lemercier, the film is due in cinemas on September 27.
Woody Allen has repeatedly announced that this 51st film will be his last. At 87, the filmmaker behind Manhattan, Annie Hall and Match Point wants to retire, and given the quality of this final film, we can only be reassured. Yes, Woody Allen's farewell to cinema was a complete failure. Coup de Chance is a failure in which all Allen's directorial tics are pushed to the extreme, bringing the film a little too close to parody.
It tells the story of Fanny and Alain (Lou de Laâge and Niels Schneider), two childhood friends who meet by chance on the streets of Paris. An affair soon ensues, except that Fanny is married to Jean (Melvil Poupaud), who obviously suspects something and wants to get to the bottom of it. It's not much of a synopsis, given the imagination and virtuosity of Woody Allen's screenplays. But there are plenty of good films with clichéd stories, and this is not one of them, where the execution is also lacking.
It's clear that by focusing his story on an ultra-bourgeois milieu, the filmmaker wanted to denounce its superficiality, but this ends up contaminating the film, and it's no longer clear where the satire lies. Moreover, Allen may have surrounded himself with some of our country's most talented actors, but they all play false. Perhaps Woody Allen's language doesn't adapt very well to French, or perhaps the director doesn't master the language well enough to direct his actors, the fact remains that the overacting is constant, and ends up annoying. In fact, we'd only recommend Coup de Chance to fans of the filmmaker, who are nonetheless curious to discover the end of a career mostly made up of excellent opuses.
The whole thing is a little too ridiculous and monotonous to be convincing, and the poverty of the writing makes us miss the usual philosophy of Woody Allen's films. But what's most astonishing is to see that the director, after a career spanning 60 years and almost as many films, makes directing errors in this one that even a beginner would try to avoid (false connections, poor camera placement, script inconsistencies...).
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