Starring: Lou de Laâge, Melvil Poupaud, Niels Schneider and Valérie Lemercier
Distributor: Sharmill Films
Runtime: 96 mins. Reviewed in Dec 2023
Reviewer: Peter W Sheehan
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This subtitled French thriller-romance is Woody Allen’s 50th feature film, and tells the story of two adults, who bond together, after meeting unexpectedly. Criminal events follow their bonding.
At first glance, the marriage of Fanny (de Laâge) and Jean Fournier (Poupaud) looks successful. They live in an upper-class apartment in Paris and have a busy working life. Jean is an established financier (with a shady business past), and Fanny is an art auctioneer.
One day, by chance, Fanny meets Alain (Schneider), who is a divorced high-school friend. Alain is now a self-deprecating fiction writer. Attracted to each other again, they start seeing each other and fall in love. Fanny decides that life with her millionaire husband (whose passion is playing with his model train in their home, and who treats her as a trophy wife) is boring. Alain’s struggle with life captivates her – he philosophises about chance, and enlivens the bohemian spirit she had shown at high-school, which had appealed to Alain.
The meeting between Fanny and Alain might have been by chance, but luck is not on Fanny’s side. Jean becomes suspicious that his wife is having an affair, and hires a private detective to investigate. Alain’s murder is arranged. A second plot is subsequently hatched in a different way by Fanny, and Jean ends up meeting an untimely death. Fanny’s prying mother (Lemercier) had started to turn against her daughter’s husband, who she thinks conspired to kill his previous business partner.
This is a slight film, but an entertaining one. The two main leads, Fanny and Alain, are engaging, and Woody Allen glides with style over Parisian high life. The film’s costuming is attractive, and scripting explores philosophically what the future might well bring into peoples’ lives. Throughout the movie, human follies are revealed in classical Allen style.
Until Alain’s murder, the film could well pass as an enjoyable comedy. But, it is Woody Allen returning to form where comedy and dark events merge unexpectedly. It is almost as if Fanny was too likeable to really consider what she was going to do, and the film at first looks to be too cheerful to confidently fit with the darkness of what lies ahead. The movie plays loosely with the morals of arranging murders and the inevitability of what follows, but Allen directs with a lightness of touch that keeps enjoyment alive.
The film explores the themes of chance, destiny, and philosophical musings about unlikely futures, and associates his criminally-edged themes with a good (jazz) musical sound-track.
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