Coup de chance

  Coup de chance is clearly an 89-year-old’s movie. If you’re going to have a stroke, let it be “of luck.” Filmed entirely in France — and in French — it’s the slandered genius’s possibly final assertion of his art and soul against the calumny he unjustly endures in America. 

As well, the spectacularly autumnal forest in the dramatic conclusion evoke the golden age of the survivor. This is prefigured in the lovers’ first meeting, accidental (fated?) in the street. There they quote some high school Prévert: ”Dead leaves picked up be the shovelful. [You see, I have not forgotten.] So are memories and regrets.” The lovers take the chance to deal with their regrets.

So too the film’s summary wisdom. Heroine Fanny reads from her murdered Alain’s novel the philosophy by which he lured his high school goddess into an affair: “She has come to the conclusion that life was a random event and that the odds of her existing were one in 400 quadrillion. Hence everyone’s life was a miracle, everybody alive had hit the jackpot. It was important not to squander this miracle and she was prepared to take full responsibility for her choices. Still, it terrified her how big a part luck played in it all. And how much it helped to be lucky. But not to dwell on it.”

She tries to hide Alain’s lottery ticket gift from husband Jean but it starts his suspicion.

In emphasizing the importance of hair-breadth chance Allen’s Paris film specifically evokes his London film Match Point (2005). The latter opened with a tennis ball suspended in mid-bounce over a net. It could fall either way. This time it falls over, to score a point. Life and lady luck are like that. At the end the killer throws a stolen wedding ring from a bridge to the Thames. It hits a rail, bounces up and then — down to the ground. Unknowingly, the killer’s intention has been thwarted. 

But no. Another murderous burglar finds that ring, which ultimately frees the real killer from suspicion. In Allen's later French forest an innocent hunter commits the fatal accident that the villain had planned for his own excuse. Fate, justice — it’s all chance, all luck. That makes life neither comedy nor tragedy but “a farce; a black farce.”

The new film also echoes the earlier one’s romantic triangle, with variations. Fanny works for an art auction house and is married to a very successful but only “practically legal” investment counsellor, Jean. That harmony is disrupted when she meets and falls for the writer who adored her in high school. 

In Match Point Emily Morton’s heroine Chloe marries Tom, a tennis pro promoted into her father’s elite business. That marriage is threatened by Scarlett Johannson’s struggling American actress, Nola (‘alone’ in reverse). Nola loses her engagement to Chloe’s brother Matthew but falls into an affair with and pregnancy by Tom. In the Paris film the opening shot follows a blond ponytail down the street. She evokes Johannson but turns out to be Fanny. Plus ca change…. This time the killer doesn’t get away with it. But neither husband is an innocent victim. 

That’s not the only cultural allusion in a film that ripples with pertinent French culture. The heroine’s maiden name is Moreau — and she has a Jeanne Moreau mouth to match. Several names evoke French culture: Fanny, Camille, Jean, Sorel, Blanc, etc. In particular the auteur shadow of Claude Chabrol drops across the wealthy upper class family shivered by betrayal and murder.

The hot lovers fear turning into Mallarme’s “swan frozen in ice.” Alain buys Fanny The Secret Garden, a fantasy novel about a child’s redemption. The title puts a cultural frame against all the floral wallpaper — pale leaves behind Jean’s office desk, lively branches behind Alain’s bed — and the autumnal forest where at least poetic justice finally descends. In his refuge from America Allen luxuriates in his adopted French culture.

The auction house in passing provides an even more dramatic allusion: Caravaggio’s painting of the boy David flaunting Goliath’s harvested head. Goliath is famously painted as the adult Caravaggio, and David after his own youthful mien. Like that painting, here Allen is the old man hanging on the arm of his past.   

One last touch. The charming but evil Jean exults in his colossal model train set. This opulent doodad grows out of some boyhood trauma. It reveals him still rooted in its insecurities and desperate for a power beyond even morality. While it shows off his wealth it reveals his insecurity.

        Like the Caravaggio connection from the past artist to the present, this train also evokes Mia Farrow’s slandering of Allen, which crumbled on the implausibility of his alleged assault on their daughter in their attic and evidence that Mia was coaching their young daughter in her testimony. The story included the problematic presence of a model train set. The detail seemed to root the allegation in a song by a Farrow friend. So Jean's lavish train set implicitly recalls why Allen is shooting in France — 32 years after that false rumour, still poisoning the air.  Allen in effect blows up the lingering allegation against him.  While Allen is largely silent in his own defence — leaving the field to Farrow — the train scene here is a dramatic but tacit reaffirmation of the aging artist’s innocence.