You can be forgiven for wondering if the new Woody Allen movie, Coup de Chance, is not actually a new Woody Allen movie. (Even the words “new Woody Allen movie,” in 2024, elicit the kind of dread foreboding Oscar Wilde has reportedly said to have felt on hearing the statement “I had a very interesting dream last night.”) It’s in French, for one thing, but what seems like the unavoidable takeaway is that the film feels like a spawn of AI: Prompt the aggregating/homogenizing cyber-Moloch of your choice with something as simple as “Woody Allen jealousy drama, in French,” and push Enter. What you’d probably get is what we have in the film: a tissue-thin riff on Woodian reflexes, cliches, tendencies, shortcuts, and cheap ideas, glossed over with an Uncanny Valley unrealness, as predictable as a cookie mold and as free of human contact as a hologram.
But then, the now 88-year-old auteur has in effect been his own AI for more than a quarter-century, robbing from himself and repeating and recycling his short shelf of plots, characters, and jokes far beyond the point of diminishing returns and into an anemic space of near-nothingness. With hardly a single convincing image or line in it, Coup de Chance plays like the 20th photocopy of Café Society, Cassandra’s Dream, and Match Point, themselves faded rips of threads from Crimes and Misdemeanors, Hannah and Her Sisters, etc. It’s like one of those “perfect” AI-spat model shots, bled down from thousands of other images: the too-shiny skin and empty eyes of no real person at all.
The plot could fit on a matchbook: Luscious Lou de Laâge is stopped on a Paris street by old schoolmate Niels Schneider, who’s “a writer,” and who mentions over a dozen times that he had a crush on her when they were younger. But she’s married to shady financier/control freak Melvil Poupaud. Despite her extreme wealth — the couple’s apartment is typical Woodian real-estate porn, complete with a gym and a…
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