Evaluate: Muted nevertheless unbowed, Woody Allen releases 50th function with Paris-set “Coup de Opportunity”

Amazingly, Woody Allen has created yet another motion picture. The lush-seeking ethical thriller “Coup de Probability,” about infidelity and murder in the Metropolis of Light, is his 50th element. It has been speculated to be his final, even by Allen, who is 88. Then once again, he’s had a lot of “last” videos, if you depend the actors who’ve said they regret working with him, the financing arrangements that have shuttered and the audiences who have presented up on him as a onetime inventive big managing on fumes.

“Coup de Chance” represents an ignominious first much too: the very first movie he’s created since the explosive 2021 docuseries “Allen v. Farrow” deepened for many the believability of the baby sexual-abuse allegations against Allen by Mia Farrow’s daughter Dylan. Are we amazed that anyone who tirelessly built a motion picture a yr for a long time (generally a person good movie just after a further) would overlook his pariah position and come across the wherewithal to keep heading?

Or that France — a put where by scandal-ridden artists have lengthy discovered refuge — would step up to give Allen a picturesque backdrop, in this circumstance for just one of his murder-most-easy tales à la “Crimes and Misdemeanors,” “Match Point” and “Irrational Man”? Below we are once again in a person of Allen’s large-toned milieus, jazz on the soundtrack and godlike cinematographer Vittorio Storaro lights it all.

Allen has made additional than a handful of movies in Europe, but generally with English-talking stars. For “Coup” he’s turned to attained French actors. The cast is headed by Lou de Laâge and Melvil Poupaud playing a very well-to-do couple and Niels Schneider as the disruptor. The end result at occasions carries the whiff of anything at the same time refreshing and nostalgic: less a getaway project and closer to an imagined hybrid of Dostoevsky, Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol, in which an inconvenient passionate spark prospects to chilly-blooded difficulty-resolving.

Our way in is younger Parisian auction-dwelling govt Fanny (De Laâge), who runs into her previous faculty pal Alain (Schneider). His attentive, poetry-citing bohemian charisma has her questioning the shallow culture everyday living she potential customers with her businessman-partner Jean (Poupaud). At the rear of Jean’s loving, gregarious actions, though, is a jealous gentleman who likes hunting (one thing Fanny should really haven taken into thing to consider) and is rumored to be ruthless plenty of to have performed away with a onetime colleague. (The gossip is amusing chitchat between his circle of mates, a depth one could unpack for several hours in the context of Allen’s individual infamy.)

If “Coup de Chance” is an exit for Allen, it is at least a gracefully produced a single. To see where by it’s heading does not devalue its breezy attraction as a shaggy-pet dog tale about regret, electric power and luck. It also rewards from a handful of good performances, primarily from De Laâge, who animates the initially fifty percent, and Valérie Lemercier in the next, as Fanny’s anxious mom.

But it’s also a reminder of how lazy Allen’s output has felt all through the last 10 years, as if his very first draft is on the monitor — the very first draft of a rehash, at that. The things that functions seldom dissuades us from the suspicion that we’re considerably from what was mordantly evocative about “Crimes” or chillingly classy about “Match Point,” darkish fantasies that disproved the self-deprecating joke from “Stardust Memories” about his lovers preferring “the early, amusing types.”

Loathe him or protect him, Allen has almost nothing to establish any more. And as “Coup” shows, he has ultimately become anything non-controversial, at least up on display screen: an artist slackening into repetition and delicate inconsequence.