Review: Muted yet unbowed, Woody Allen releases 50th feature with Paris-set “Coup de Chance”

Incredibly, Woody Allen has made another movie. The lush-looking moral thriller “Coup de Chance,” about infidelity and murder in the City of Light, is his 50th feature. It has been speculated to be his last, even by Allen, who is 88. Then again, he’s had many “last” movies, if you count the actors who’ve said they regret working with him, the financing arrangements that have shuttered and the audiences who have given up on him as a onetime creative giant running on fumes.

“Coup de Chance” represents an ignominious first too: the first film he’s made since the explosive 2021 docuseries “Allen v. Farrow” deepened for many the credibility of the child sexual-abuse allegations against Allen by Mia Farrow’s daughter Dylan. Are we surprised that someone who tirelessly made a movie a year for decades (often one great movie after another) would ignore his pariah status and find the wherewithal to keep going?

Or that France — a place where scandal-ridden artists have long found refuge — would step up to give Allen a picturesque backdrop, in this case for one of his murder-most-convenient tales à la “Crimes and Misdemeanors,” “Match Point” and “Irrational Man”? Here we are again in one of Allen’s high-toned milieus, jazz on the soundtrack and godlike cinematographer Vittorio Storaro lighting it all.

Allen has made more than a handful of films in Europe, but always with English-speaking stars. For “Coup” he’s turned to accomplished French actors. The cast is headed by Lou de Laâge and Melvil Poupaud playing a well-to-do couple and Niels Schneider as the disruptor. The result at times carries the whiff of something simultaneously refreshing and nostalgic: less a vacation project and closer to an imagined hybrid of Dostoevsky, Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol, in which an inconvenient romantic spark leads to cold-blooded problem-solving.

Melvil Poupaud in the movie “Coup de Chance.”

(Gravier Productions)

Our way in is young Parisian auction-house executive Fanny (De Laâge), who runs into her old school pal Alain (Schneider). His attentive, poetry-citing bohemian charisma has her questioning the shallow society life she leads with her businessman-husband Jean (Poupaud). Behind Jean’s loving, gregarious behavior, though, is a jealous man who likes hunting (something Fanny should haven taken into consideration) and is rumored to be ruthless enough to have done away with a onetime colleague. (The gossip is amusing chitchat among his circle of friends, a detail one could unpack for hours in the context of Allen’s own infamy.)

If “Coup de Chance” is an exit for Allen, it’s at least a gracefully made one. To see where it’s heading doesn’t devalue its breezy appeal as a shaggy-dog tale about regret, power and luck. It also benefits from a handful of solid performances, especially from De Laâge, who animates the first half, and Valérie Lemercier in the second, as Fanny’s concerned mother.

But it’s also a reminder of how lazy Allen’s output has felt during the last decade, as if his first draft is on the screen — the first draft of a rehash, at that. The stuff that works rarely dissuades us from the suspicion that we’re far from what was mordantly evocative about “Crimes” or chillingly elegant about “Match Point,” dark fantasies that disproved the self-deprecating joke from “Stardust Memories” about his fans preferring “the early, funny ones.”

Loathe him or defend him, Allen has nothing to prove anymore. And as “Coup” shows, he has finally become something non-controversial, at least up on screen: an artist slackening into repetition and mild inconsequence.