Be careful: Stroke of luck (now streaming on VOD services like Amazon Prime Video) is the newest chapter in Woody Allen’s Cinematic Universe, which is filled with boring people endowed with superhuman pomposity and self-absorption. The 88-year-old filmmaker’s scandal-plagued personal life (to be extremely brief, his alleged sexual abuse of a young Dylan Farrow and his marriage to his stepdaughter Soon-Yi Previn); Judge for yourself or separate the art from the artist if you wish; has always seeped into the background of his career, but is in full swing in the post-#MeToo world. And that finds him exiled from Hollywood, directing a French-language comedy-drama with an all-French cast, a film notable only for the notoriety of its creator. It’s also a film in which Allen’s once charming narrative attributes become alarmingly stale.
BLOW OF OPPORTUNITY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The essence: Fanny (Lou de Laage) walks to work, where, of course, she oversees high-end art auctions. Alain (Niels Schneider), a writer of course, walks down the same street and turns around as soon as he sees Fanny. They attended the same school in New York City years before. She remembers him but he In fact He remembers her: he was very in love with her and he is not afraid to say it now. What are the chances that they would meet here on the streets of Paris, so far from where they first met? Thin, I would say. Thin like the Jim in the bucket on the cellar counter. The problem is that she is happily married to Jean (Melvil Poupaud), a gentleman described by one character as “delightfully solvent” and whose solvency is tied to some nebulous financial ruse that not even his wife understands. It involves “making the rich richer,” and all of this adds up to the type of person Woody Allen describes. hateso this is our villain and we should hate him too.
Anyway, Alain is writing a novel that he says is about irony and coincidence, and he lives in a charming, quaint loft apartment, and this is all when Allen tells us that this guy is great, salt of the earth , a true guardian. Alain convinces Fanny to have lunch with him and, despite her marital status, he flatters her by talking over and over again about how beautiful and intelligent she is. And she is, in fact, beautiful and intelligent, because we have eyes and ears that notice these things, just as all the characters in the movie also notice these things, because it seems that all they talk about is how beautiful and intelligent she is. . They also gossip about Jean, because in his life before Fanny, his business partner disappeared under mysterious circumstances and he benefited greatly from it. Hmm. Jean and Fanny half-joke about her being his trophy wife, and considering he worries about her appearance while she’s arm-in-arm with her at fancy parties and always dictates that they spend weekends at their houses covered in ivy. rural mansion so she can shoot guns at forest creatures even though she gets bored with such excursions, that tells us that at least 51 percent is no joke. Again: Jean robs his wife of some of her autonomy and kills animals, so he’s a straw man that Allen supports so he can, figuratively, attack him with a shillelagh or stab him dozens of times with a cheese knife.
Those of us who have seen too many Woody Allen films will be surprised, shocked, to learn that Fanny and Alain soon begin “having an affair,” a phrase that, like “making love,” no one says anymore. unless they’re in a Woody Allen movie. If you ate a small piece of brie every time the word “affair” appeared in dialogue, you’d look like Jabba the Hutt by the end of the movie. Fanny talks and thinks about the affair constantly and ends up acting all nervous and neurotic and is nervous at work and at home, and could almost tell that Jean is not a good guy, even though her mother Camille (Valerie Lemercier) He talks over and over again about how big and rich he is. Jean notices his change in tone and behavior, so she hires a private detective to confirm his suspicion: he is having an affair! And that’s when Jean talks to a couple of thug-looking guys who frequent a boxing gym, and while they’re not the kind of guys he normally associates with, they’re not rich guys trying to get rich; It sure seems like he’s worked with them before.
What movies will it remind you of?: Unfortunately, there are several dozen more Woody Allen films. Its pseudo-comedy of intellectuals in infidelity is reminiscent of forgettable titles like Anything else either you are going to visit a tall dark strangerand its dramatic suspense components are based on the good will of Turning point either Crimes and misdemeanors.
Performance worth seeing: De Laage shows significant screen presence, but the material often seems too broad and obvious for you to find much subtlety or nuance.
Memorable dialogue: Jean pronounces the subtext out loud: “I don’t believe in irony or chance. And I have no respect for people who count on luck. There is no such thing as luck. We make our luck.”
Sex and skin: No.
Our opinion: There are no romantic shots of Paris landmarks or old-world cityscapes in this film, a sign that Stroke of luck it’s not Midnight in Paris. It foreshadows the plot’s eventual dark turn, a shift in tone from light and ethereal to deadly serious. And the change almost works; the film could have benefited from a more drastic alteration in tone rather than the bland blandness that Allen offers. The story begins like many of the filmmaker’s features, with people thinking they are happily married until something attractive crosses the protagonist’s path and gives them another idea to think about. And it ends on a note of somber contemplation of a theme Allen has explored many times before: the inexplicable collision of irony, fate, and chance.
To be honest, this is Allen’s usual shit. He’s been making this movie over and over again for years. The characters are Allen’s neurotic archetypes: his characters are always upper-middle-class artists, never waiters, office managers or janitors, who babble on and on about poems while drinking expensive wine or posing in front of walls and walls. of books books books. (Anyone else exhausted by Allen’s pretentious dialogue like “Marcel wrote a very good book on Gaugin!”?) Some filmmakers can hone their variations on a theme to a point, but this Allen effort is bland and lifeless. .
Unlike the filmmaker’s more inspired efforts, the comedy in Stroke of luck it has no beginning, the drama is routine, the characters suffer from serious plausibility problems (especially Fanny, whose behavior changes at the end of a plot point). I can say that I was intrigued to see how the story unfolded, as it revolves around a part of the mother-in-law that is both ridiculous and old but also slyly funny (does Fanny’s mother read too many detective novels?? Why? Of course yes!). But the clumsy execution of the climax fits so closely with Allen’s overwrought, almost intellectual themes that it inspires derisive laughter. I’m pretty sure that wasn’t his intention.
Our call: Besides all this, Stroke of luck It is an onerous bore. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic living in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
