This weekend, 13 movie theaters around the country will be showing “Coup de Chance,” a brisk French-language thriller about a bored wife in Paris who cheats on her wealthy, aloof husband with an old high school classmate, triggering fatal consequences.
Minus the opening credits and certain trademark elements — jazzy score, moneyed setting, themes of murder and luck, dry cosmopolitan banter — a typical viewer could watch the movie without knowing it is the 50th film directed by Woody Allen.
The foreign language (one in which Allen is not fluent — his original script was translated for filming), the absence of the kinds of American stars that typically crowd Allen’s casts, the low-key reception with which this milestone has been greeted: All suggest the awkwardness surrounding this new release by a filmmaker as distinctive as he is polarizing.
“We just continue to do what we’ve been doing, and we’re happy that it’s opening,” Letty Aronson, Allen’s sister, who has produced his films since 1994, said in an interview this week. She said “Coup de Chance” was financed in Europe, and declined to disclose its backers.
“I’m happy that it’s opening,” she added. “Woody is only interested in the creative part — once that’s done and he makes the film, he never sees it again. If you told him it wasn’t opening in the United States, it wouldn’t matter to him.”
Allen, 88, has a more than half-century career as a writer and director of influential classics such as “Annie Hall” (1977) and “Crimes and Misdemeanors” (1989). A late period commencing with 2005’s “Match Point” has featured collaborations with stars like Scarlett Johansson, Timothée Chalamet and Cate Blanchett, who won an Oscar for “Blue Jasmine” (2013). Allen’s 2011 comedy “Midnight in Paris” brought him his fourth Oscar, for original screenplay, and took in more than $150 million worldwide — a megahit by the standards of independent cinema.
But for many filmgoers, affection for his movies has been overshadowed by allegations against him personally. In 1992, his daughter Dylan Farrow, then 7, said Allen had sexually assaulted her, months after he had begun a relationship with Soon-Yi Previn, the teenage daughter of Mia Farrow, his former partner and Dylan’s mother. (Previn is now Allen’s wife of 26 years.)
Following an inquiry by child-abuse investigators at Yale-New Haven Hospital, Allen was never prosecuted. He denies having assaulted Dylan Farrow. He and his defenders have suggested Mia Farrow coached their daughter.
For decades, Dylan Farrow’s accusation, as well as Allen’s relationship with Previn, did not appear to hinder Allen’s ability to make movies — between 1982 and 2017, there were no calendar years when a new feature film directed by Allen was not released. His mainstream reputation remained largely intact until 2014, when Dylan Farrow, as an adult, reiterated her accusation (which was published on a New York Times Opinion columnist’s blog) shortly after Allen received a lifetime achievement award at the Golden Globes.
“What’s your favorite Woody Allen movie?” Farrow wrote. “Before you answer, you should know: when I was seven years old, Woody Allen took me by the hand and led me into a dim, closet-like attic on the second floor of our house. He told me to lay on my stomach and play with my brother’s electric train set. Then he sexually assaulted me.”
Amid the #MeToo moment three years later, and following another essay by Farrow — this one asking, “Why has the #MeToo revolution spared Woody Allen?” — many film critics pointed to Allen as the quintessential instance of the emerging question: how to consider the work and legacy of an important, even beloved artist who stood accused of unforgivable acts?
Actors Chalamet and Rebecca Hall announced they would donate their salaries from “A Rainy Day in New York” (2019), and other past collaborators, including Kate Winslet, Mira Sorvino, Colin Firth and Greta Gerwig publicly expressed regret at having worked with Allen. (Still others, including Diane Keaton, who played Annie Hall, continued to defend him.)
In 2018, Amazon dissolved a multimillion-dollar movie agreement with Allen, citing a renewed focus on the allegations, and the next year dropped “A Rainy Day in New York.”
It is far from clear that audiences have decisively turned on Allen. “A Rainy Day in New York,” a romantic comedy starring Chalamet, Elle Fanning and Selena Gomez, with a different distributor made nearly $25 million at the box office outside North America, where its footprint was far smaller.
“Coup de Chance” (it means “stroke of luck”) premiered in September at the Venice Film Festival to a seven-minute standing ovation and protests outside. It opened months ago in France, Spain and a dozen other countries. On Friday, theaters in seven states will show it, including Quad Cinema in Allen’s adopted borough of Manhattan. It will be available to stream beginning April 12.
Allen’s 50th film may not even prove his last. A new movie, Aronson said, “is in the process of being negotiated.”
Aronson added, “Woody is working on a script. So we’ll see what happens.”
