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Movie Review: Coup de Chance (2023) [1]

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Date: 2025-04-05

SPOILER ALERT!

I just finished reading Coup de Chance. It’s a movie, of course, but I spent so much time reading the subtitles that it is with much reluctance that I can bring myself to say that I watched this movie. Apparently, Woody Allen was so enamored of foreign filmmakers like Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, François Truffaut, and several others, with whom you are doubtless familiar, that he just had to make a foreign film of his own. To that end, the movie is set in France, and everyone in the movie speaks French.

The difference, of course, is that whereas Bergman, Fellini, Truffaut, et al. were simply making movies in their own language for domestic consumption, Allen is an American for whom English is his natural language. Furthermore, there is no reason that the story could not have been set in America. In short, his French foreign filmed is forced.

Let me make some distinctions. There are three kinds of foreign films. First, there are those made in countries where English is spoken naturally, like England and Canada; second, there are the movies where English is dubbed in; and third, there are the movies with subtitles. Back in the day when there were video stores, it was only movies in this last category that were grouped together as Foreign Films.

And for good reason. I don’t believe I am alone in saying that it is this third category that really tries one’s patience. It’s not too bad when there are only occasional subtitles or when they are limited to certain sections of the movie, as in Allen’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask) (1972), where he satirizes Italian foreign films in one segment. But when the entire movie is subtitled, that is a bit much.

This is especially so when the movie is talkative as is Coup de Chance. It wasn’t too bad in scenes with just one man and one woman, where I would know when it was the man who was saying what was written at the bottom of the screen and when it was the woman, although I still could not see their facial expressions or see what they were doing. But when there was a group of people all talking to one another, I had to keep rewinding the tape, so to speak, to see who had said what to whom. Had I seen this movie in a theater, that option would not have been available.

A long time ago, after forcing myself to watch movies by the likes of Bergman, Fellini, and Truffaut, I decided that I had read my last movie. But since I have been a fan of Woody Allen since the 1960s, I decided to make an exception in his case. I’m glad I did because notwithstanding all the subtitles, it is a pretty good murder mystery, throughout which there are competing philosophies: one emphasizing the importance of chance or luck, as indicated by the title; the other, the role of the will in determining the course of one’s life.

I announced that this review would have spoilers, but I will not go so far as to give away the ending. In fact, part of what makes this movie so suspenseful is that while some of Allen’s murder mysteries have the bad guy get caught or killed in the end, like Scoop (2006) or Irrational Man (2015), he sometimes lets a major character get away with murder and live happily ever after, as in Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) or Match Point (2005). So even toward the end, we are not sure whether the bad guy will get away with it.

Of course, I still say it would have been a better movie had it been in English and set in America.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/4/5/2309776/-Movie-Review-Coup-de-Chance-2023?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web

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