Woody Allen's Coup de Chance (2023) is an old man's movie. The picture exemplifies what is sometimes called a "late style" in art -- the film is radically simplified, economical, and lucidly constructed. Four characters interact to dramatize a parable that seems alternatively trite and obvious but also profound: the film's thesis is that chance and accident control the world and that, for this reason, life is meaningless. Notwithstanding the movie's bleak thesis, the picture is beautifully shot and replete with images of people enjoying the pleasures of food, art, and love. Allen's mise-en-scene reverts to the earliest film grammar: the picture is composed in short, decisive scenes each devised to make a plot point; at the film's two climaxes, that is nodes of greatest emotional intensity, Allen crosscuts between his characters -- it's a technique that Griffith and Murnau perfected. Consider, for instance, the scenes in Nosferatu in which Murnau cuts between a young woman's growing sense of discomfort and anxiety and shots of the vampire, a thousand miles away, menacing her fiancee. Coup de Chance is autumnal in appearance, content, and texture -- there's no preliminaries, no scene-setting, no throat-clearing; the jazz music on the soundtrack, Nat Adderly and Herbie Hancock among others, proceeds in a manner that is independent from the action on-screen; dire episodes are scored to jaunty jazz riffs. There is no excess to the film and the movie seems impersonal, almost post-dramatic (if that is a thing); Coup de Chance is decidedly non-novelistic -- it's cast is stripped to a bare minimum, plot points are sometimes made by a sort of antiphonal chorus of upper-crust gossips, and there are no detours and digressions; Woody Allen's film form was always based on the short story -- Coup de Chance is not even a short story, but rather a lean, minimalist anecdote. (It appears that Allen, the great poet of Manhattan, now lives in Paris. Coup de Chance is shot entirely in French, although all of the characters, it seems, have lived in New York City in the past.)
Allen's magisterial simplicity is demonstrated in the film's opening scene: a woman is walking along a busy Parisian street. The camera in a Steadi-Cam shot follows her at a discrete distance. As is the case with big cities, the pedestrians keep to themselves and scarcely glance at one another. The viewer immediately notices an exception: a handsome young man approaching the camera (so we can see his eyes and face) looks closely at the woman who we are trailing -- her face is not visible to us. He seems uncertain for a moment, passes the woman who doesn't pay any attention to him at all, but, then, calls out her name. It is a chance meeting on the street between old high school acquaintance, the accident from which the film derives. The woman, Fanny Fournier, is beautiful and waifish -- she looks a little like Mia Farrow. She works at an art auction enterprise and is married to a handsome, doting husband named Jean. Jean seems a little domineering; he seems to have purchased his wife and gives her expensive gifts -- although she doesn't want to be regarded as a "trophy wife", in fact, this is what Jean's upper-crust friends call her. Jean is said to be like the Great Gatsby -- he is very wealthy but there is a surmise that his money was acquired through criminal means. (Jean's partner vanished in mysterious circumstances ten or fifteen years before the action in the film and there a group of three or four acquaintances in his circle who suspect him of having murdered the man -- these friends provide a counterpoint to the action and comment like a Greek chorus on the action; they are petty, malicious, and backbiting.) The young man who chances upon Fanny on the street is Alain Aubert, a novelist who had a crush on the woman when they were in High School together. Alain is writing a novel about the role of contingency and chance in human life. In High School, Fanny carried around Tolstoy's Anna Karenina; she is now reading Appointment at Samarra. (Allen isn't subtle and makes his points with literary references.) Of course, Fanny and Alain embark on a love affair. Jean suspects that something is wrong with his marriage. He hires a private eye to surveil Fanny and, within an hour or so, the truth is known. (The gumshoe is a haggard, sinister older woman who melts into the background and effortlessly documents the affair -- she is a convincing minor figure in the film, carefully and indelibly characterized but without a single line spoken.) Jean, who seems to have a screw loose, has a room in his lavishly appointed townhouse in Paris, devoted to his model trains -- it's an effect a little like the artificial forest in the loft in Ibsen's The Wild Duck, a symbolic terrain that establishes Jean as obsessive, a control-freak, and, even, a little pathetic. Jean has a home in the country, a rather lavish chalet in the woods, and, most weekends, he and his wife retire to that place, something that she dislikes as dull -- she says she's not an "outdoorsy girl." There are hunting rifles on the premises and deer in the woods, both aspects of the chalet that will figure in the film's later development. Jean is savagely jealous of Fanny's lover and hires a thug to dispose of him. A crime is committed. A fourth character enters into this situation -- Fanny's mother. This middle-aged woman reads novels by Georges Simenon and she begins nosing about.
Coup de Chance is exquisitely made and suspenseful -- it's a kind of crime-thriller and not a comedy except to the extent that it satirizes the affectations of the Parisian upper-class. Allen is highly reticent; like Clint Eastwood in his late films, he implies violence but doesn't show it. Similarly, the film's sex scenes are also restrained and, as in the case of Hollywood's classic era, Allen cuts away when things grow too intense. The cinematography is by Vittorio Storaro (he's now in his eighties) and the picture is astonishingly beautiful -- Paris glows in an amber, honeyed light; in one scene with rain outdoors and glowing rooms inside a Paris apartment, the picture channels Storaro's incredible work in Last Tango in Paris, a movie that I recall not so much for the explicit sex scenes with Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider but for the contrast between warm interiors and cold, dispassionate rainy weather outside. Storaro makes everything elegant --he's a film cameraman par excellence; there's nothing showy about his compositions but the style isn't "invisible' as in the classic Hollywood films; rather, there's a distinct texture to the light and you can feel the air intervening between lens and flesh. Coup de Chance is a minor film but it doesn't aspire to anything pretentious and, in its own unostentatious way, it's pretty much perfect.
No comments:
Post a Comment