(Venice) Woody Allen’s reputation has suffered so much in recent years that he is having difficulty financing his films in the United States. The recent HBO documentary “Allen vs. Farrow” sheds new light on allegations of sexual misconduct against his 7-year-old adopted daughter Dylan Farrow in the early 1990s.
Posted at 4:00 p.m.
In Europe, however, the Manhattan and Annie Hall filmmaker’s aura appears to be intact, judging by the triumphant reception he received at a press conference in Venice on Monday. An ovation upon his arrival, a hunt for autographs before his departure and not the slightest question about his new pariah status: as if the Mostra were an airlock cut off from the world. He is happy…
Woody Allen visited the Serenissima to support his fiftieth career film as a director, Coup de Chance, which was shown out of competition. His first feature film made in a language other than English stars Lou de Laagence, Melvil Poupaud and Franco-Québécois Niels Schneider.
“I finally felt like I was a European filmmaker,” said the filmmaker of “Midnight in Paris,” “To Rome With Love” and “Vicky Cristina Barcelona.”
I have seen all the films by Truffaut, Godard, Resnais, Renoir. I wanted to join this group by making a film in French.
Woody Allen
Reminiscent of Match Point or Blue Jasmine in some ways, Coup de Chance is Woody Allen’s best work in a decade. His most recent films, the very small Rifkin’s Festival and A Rainy Day in New York, gave the impression that inspiration had deserted him with the rise of the #metoo movement.
Without being a great work in his filmography, quite the opposite, Coup de Chance is a successful Woody Allen, both in its form, the vaudeville bordering on the thriller, and in the exploitation of its recurring themes (the couple, infidelity, coincidence , death, etc.). We come out of it with a smile on our faces thanks to a delightful final scene that finds us humming the tune of Herbie Hancock’s Cantaloupe Island.
Coup de Chance is the story of a young woman, Fanny (Lou de Laage), who is uptight in the context of her bourgeois marriage to a paternalistic Parisian financier (Melvil Poupaud). Jean is a Gatsby with a checkered past, “deliciously solvent,” but not very clean. Fanny accidentally meets a former classmate from the French high school in New York (Niels Schneider). Alain, an unconventional and unattached writer – “I have written in Bogotá, even in Montreal! ” he says – woos her eagerly and admits that she has been the object of all his desires since his youth.
In the end she gives in to his advances. Jean, suspecting this, hires a detective to uncover his affair (as in Truffaut’s “Stolen Kisses”). And Fanny’s mother (Valérie Lemercier), who also suspects it, gets involved in this game of love and chance that is typical of Woody Allen’s cinema. The dialogues are more or less believable, the acting sometimes goes to the excess of tabloid theater, but it is skillfully constructed and very amusing.
“I’ve been lucky all my life. “I had loving parents, good friends, a wonderful wife, a marriage and two children,” said Allen, who is a father of five. I’ll be 88 in a few months and have never been in the hospital. Nothing serious happened to me. »
I have received a lot of undeserved praise and a tremendous amount of attention and respect throughout my life. I was just lucky and I hope it continues like this. It’s still early afternoon…
Woody Allen
Looking at this frail man with a hunched back and a drawling voice, I had to wonder if “Coup de Chance” wasn’t Woody Allen’s swansong. He has maintained the routine of his good days – writing his scripts in a notebook in bed before retyping them on a typewriter – but can no longer find distributors for his films in North America.
When asked by a journalist whether he would direct another film in his hometown of New York, he received this clear answer: “If someone comes out of the shadows and says they would finance my film in New York by making my terrible ones Conditions accepted – He can’t read the script, he can’t know who the actors are, he just has to give me the money and go… – if some idiot accepts all this, I’ll make a film in New York. »
As they say in Manhattan: fat luck.
PHOTO TIZIANA FABI, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
Japanese filmmaker Ryusuke Hamaguchi
On the way to Hamaguchi
Japanese filmmaker Ryusuke Hamaguchi won the Oscar for Best International Film last year with the great Drive My Car. We recognize the signature of the brilliant filmmaker of “Tale of Chance and Other Fantasies” in the magnificent first scene of his new film “Evil Does Not Exist,” which was presented on Monday in the official competition of the Venice Film Festival.
We look at the treetops in a tracking shot from a low angle to the sound of the very beautiful music by the composer Eiko Ishibashi. Then we discover the character of Takumi (Hitoshi Omika), who spends a long time cutting wood in the forest. Hamaguchi is a filmmaker who likes to take his time. In addition, his new film, elegant, thoughtful, hazy, is not overloaded with a multitude of twists and turns.
PHOTO GABRIEL BOUYS, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
Eiko Ishibashi and Ryusuke Hamaguchi
“Evil Does Not Exist” is the opposite of a Hollywood action film. It tells a snippet of the life of Takumi, the forgetful father of an 8-year-old girl who lives in harmony with nature in the countryside.
His peace and quiet, like that of his fellow citizens, is disturbed by a Tokyo company that wants to build a glamping site (luxury campsite) in “his” forest.
An information event about the project failed to calm the dissatisfaction of citizens, who particularly feared contamination of the spring water from the mountain. The company insists and tries to recruit Takumi into the project by offering him a job, but tragedy looms…
Inspired first by the music of Eiko Ishibashi for the atmosphere of his film, then by a message for his scenario, Ryusuke Hamaguchi offers a new poetic and sensitive film about incommunicability and the importance of dialogue, as he mentioned on Monday at a press conference.
Following “Drive My Car” without being quite as successful, “Evil Does Not Exist” deals with several similar themes – often in a car – with just as much melancholy and dramatic sense. What drives man to be a wolf to man? Hamaguchi seems to ask in this succinct and delicate work, the conclusion of which remains open to all interpretations.