The opening titles are always written in the same font, in white on a black background. But this time there is an essential novelty: they are in French, because the fiftieth film written and directed by Woody Allen was not only shot in Paris with French actors, but is also entirely in the language of Renoir and Louis Malle, for example They are two directors who will be honored as part of “Ein Glücksfall”. A choice that should also be a kind of thanks to the country that appreciated him more than anyone else, and at the same time a productive challenge (as he himself admitted, his knowledge of the French language is anything but academic). ), which he proves at 87 years old (when he made the film: he turned 88 a few days ago, on November 30th), Allen still wanted to challenge himself with something new for himself.
At the heart of the film is maintaining these ninety-six minutes of cinematic enjoyment (against those who believe we can no longer be vital today), the theme of randomness and how people’s lives have to keep up with something they have that you absolutely cannot predict . Just like it happens to Fanny (Lou de Laâge) and Alain (Niels Schneider), high school friends who meet by chance in Paris: she is married to the rich and possessive Jean Fournier (Melvil Poupaud), works in an auction house and is trying (without much conviction) to escape the “trophy wife” state to which he ultimately banishes her; He is a writer and seems to have never forgotten his crush on her as a student, but above all he still retains that carefree youthful rebelliousness that Fanny had as a teenager.
It is easy to understand that this chance encounter, illuminated by Vittorio Storaro with his warm light and recorded with a very gentle steady cam sequence, through shared sandwiches eaten on the benches of Paris parks, will soon become the beginning of becomes a new, overwhelming love. All the more exciting because Fanny and Jean’s everyday life is predictable and cold and even the icy walls of their elegant apartment echo. But what could be another example of how fate likes to play cruel tricks on people becomes for Jean a kind of challenge to his own faith and ultimately to his own status: “I don’t believe in coincidence,” he tells the private detective (Grégory Gadebois), whom he asks to follow his wife -. I despise those who rely on chance: there is no such thing as luck, luck is provoked.” And in the second, the viewer learns how the husband decides to “shape” his own fate by turning a sentimental comedy into a detective story Part of the film.
Fanny’s mother Camille (Valérie Lemercie, skillfully used as contrast, she is used to being a comic actress) also arrives to promote and accelerate the change, but the real protagonist of this reversal is Allen’s extraordinary lightness, this kind of melancholic wisdom , which…leads the viewer through the complications of life and in “A Stroke of Luck” takes the form of a very bitter smile. Even when we move to Paris, we are always faced with the typical characters of Woody Allen: the intellectual who is guided by his own creativity and is ready to accept the randomness of life, the bourgeois who despises this randomness because he unwilling to admit that “as long as it works” and wanting to adapt the world to her size, the woman who is able to embrace the strength of feelings even when she is ready to question her life.
And so Woody Allen is among the rich leisure hunters who remember Renoir’s “Rule of the Game”, accompanied by the notes of the Modern Jazz Quartet and Nat Adderley (declared homage to the jazz atmospheres of Malle’s “Elevator to the Gallows”) The Spectator is part of the unpredictable game of fate and uncertainty in which there are those who will be saved and those who will not. One of the mysteries of life that fascinates him most. And we with him.