You can’t take your eyes of Coup de Chance no matter how unsettling the story is, and like many Woody Allen films, it is that.
As one of my students said of American Beauty, a 1999 sensation, Coup is “a couple hours of watching people do things you wish they wouldn’t do.”
Actually, it’s just over an hour and a half. What may make it seem longer is that, before it ends, there are at least three moments when you think it will end.
What makes it seem shorter has to be the rapid pace of an energetic cast–not one of them known to American audiences–working with a crisp script, and a sizzling jazz soundtrack well established during opening credits. Many in Screening Room audiences sit through the end credits to hear it full tilt.
If that’s not enough, plot twists still surprise you no matter how much you expect them from Allen.
Yes, it is in French, and I have a theory that Allen wanted a film in subtitles for a very specific reason. Something in it I’ve never seen before, but I can’t say what or even where that is for fear of spoiling the effect.
Coup reminded me most of his 2005 film, Match Point, in part because both are about infidelity, but more because both films illustrate a frequently cited enigmatic quote from “The Mat-Maker” chapter in Moby-Dick:
Chance, though restrained in its play within the right lines of necessity, and sideways in its motions directed by free will, though thus prescribed to by both, chance by turns rules either, and has the last featuring blow at events.
As Allen himself told an interviewer: “You’re very dependent on chance and luck in life, more than you think.”
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Held over at the Screening Room: Thurs 5/23, 7:00 pm; Fri & Sat 24 & 25, 4:30 pm; and Wed & Thurs 29 & 30, 7:00 pm.
Jack Garvey (1951 - ) was born and raised in Lawrence, Mass., before attending Salem State College (now University} where his BA was delayed three semesters by The Log (the student newspaper), the anti-war movement, and other counter-culture activities. Unwilling to serve the Fort Kent, Maine, Chamber of Commerce as a reporter for the St. John Valley Times, he disappeared west of the Mississippi River, turning up as a graduate student and teacher of freshman composition at South Dakota State University, as a grant-writer for the United Tribes of North Dakota, as a vagabond on the West Coast who paused a few weeks to pick cherries and train hops in Oregon's Willamette Valley, and as a busker in Denver's historic Larimer Square.
Returning to Massachusetts after about seven years--the same time that the Prodigal Son returned to a fatted calf--Garvey landed north of Boston to resume busking in the coastal tourist towns of Newburyport and Salem while teaching as an adjunct instructor at most every college within a 90-minute drive. A year later, in 1983, he began writing guest columns for the Newburyport Daily News and the weekly Newburyport Current. In 1999 he joined King Richard's Renaissance Faire in Carver, Mass., where he has performed every fall as a strolling minstrel to this day. Last fall he also performed in Cry Innocent, a re-enactment of a witch trial in Salem. He still writes for the Daily News, and he has since included Lexington, Mass., to his busking circuit.
He has compiled three books: Pay the Piper! A Street-Performer's Public Life in America's Privatized Times (2014), Keep Newburyport Weird: An Atlas of Downtown Rhyme and Surfside Reason (2018), and Once Upon an Attention Span: An All-Purpose Pub for the United States of Amnesia (2024).
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Mouth of the River 