Coup de Chance Review: Woody Allen’s Domestic Thriller Is a Model of Understatement

Woody Allen’s Coup de Chance starts appropriately with a random encounter and finishes with an out-of-nowhere intervention. But what lies in between those moments of chance is tightly scripted and purposeful, with barely a scene or line out of place. The film is at once among Allen’s most economical works and one of his most free-spirited.

When Alain (Niels Schneider), a fiction writer, runs into Fanny (Lou de Laâge) on a Parisian street near the art auction house where the latter works, it’s a seemingly fleeting moment. Fanny seems charmed but not overly impacted by this encounter with Alain, a passing acquaintance from their time at the Lycée Français in New York. Slightly restless in her marriage to Jean (Melvil Poupaud), a financier whose one-percenter friends describe her as a “trophy wife,” Fanny sees no harm in reconnecting with Alain. You can imagine where this might go.

Coffees, walks in the park, and enthusiastic chats follow. Alain is open and winningly self-deprecating. Fanny is all smiles, basking in the gleam of his attention. Alain’s increasingly bold hints that his adolescent crush on her never abated make an impact on the supposedly happily married Fanny. After Alain jokes about his younger self swooning over “the beautiful nerd in a black turtleneck,” she makes sure to wear a black turtleneck at their next encounter.

Throughout Coup de Chance, Allen’s unabashedly romantic dedication to the moments leading up to Alain and Fanny’s affair—all deeply, dorkily sincere talk about life and art that’s handsomely filmed by cinematographer Vittorio Storaro in leaf-strewn city locales—keeps the plot from seeming too mechanical or contrived. There’s a slightly adolescent innocence to this affair that de Laâge and Poupaud play for all it’s worth. Fanny is understandably tired of all the weekends in the country with Jean’s dull friends, and as she’s unconsciously looking for a way out, she ignores, in the heat of passion, all the signs that there may not be a storybook ending.

Parallel to Fanny and Alain’s not-so-secret infatuation, Jean starts having doubts. Save for a streak of jealousy and a tendency to take things too far, he’s not coded as an obvious villain. Coup de Chance initially makes Jean out to be more of a clueless cuckold, obsessing over his spectacularly complex model train set while Fanny and Alain canoodle in Alain’s garret.

The first third or so of the film sets us up for a light comedy of manners. It looks at first like the biggest challenge for the young lovers will be Fanny adjusting to less luxurious circumstances after leaving Jean. Of course, the change would not be that rough, since Alain is that rare writer who can afford to plunk down six months of Parisian rent in advance. In the end, Allen’s class commentary is confined to surface issues like Fanny’s irritation with upper-crust stuffiness.

But as the affair progresses, Jean’s jealousy shifts into a higher gear and Coup de Chance, in turn, begins wading into darker territory. Hints about the shadowy provenance of his wealth, comparisons to Jay Gatsby, and what happened to his former business partner are dropped with increasing frequency. By the time Jean hires a private detective to follow Fanny, the repeated shots of him hunting in the woods begin to seem less a sign of his aristocratic striving than an ominous warning of what he’s capable of. Once Alain is dispatched by a pair of goons who Jean seems to keep on retainer for disappearing troublesome individuals, the story turns from how Fanny can extricate herself from her marriage to how her increasingly suspicious mother’s (Valérie Lemercier) snooping into Jean’s past risks upending their lives.

As with most late-period Allen films, the characters are written in ways that can make them seem more like ideas than organic people. There’s little subtext or nuance in the dialogue: Jean’s cold-bloodedness is made clear by his asserting “reality is rarely beautiful” while Fanny’s less materialistic side is signaled by her declaring “my soul remains rebellious.” Fortunately for Coup de Chance, the confident pacing, neat plot turns in the last act, and brightly engaged performances elevate the clever yet sometimes too on-the-nose writing.

In the diagram of Allen’s body of work, Coup de Chance intersects the idealized world of Midnight in Paris, where art and literature are seemingly revered by all, and the crisply plotted crime mechanics of Match Point, where murder is used as a logical yet amoral solution to a bothersome affair. Unusually for Allen, he doesn’t use the introduction of violence in the film’s second half as a launchpad for an investigation of rights and wrongs.

But the part-playful and part-deadpan way in which Coup de Chance approaches its grim subject matter maintains a strong appeal. The bop-heavy soundtrack includes pieces by the likes of Cannonball Adderley and Herbie Hancock, whose “Cantaloupe Island” practically functions as a leavening agent when the film is at its darkest. Between that, a playful reference to Georges Simenon, and the largely angst-free performances, it’s clear that Allen wants to avoid overburdening this economical dark comedy. By not investing the story’s fraught love triangle with too many external considerations, he dignifies the film through understatement.