Stroke of luck: Woody Allen disappoints (review)
Match Point in Paris? Rather a bourgeois thriller full of clichés which doesn’t say much, neither about the thriller, nor about the bourgeois. Fortunately, there is Melvil Poupaud!
The star of Stroke of luckits main attraction is neither its script nor Match Pointneither Paris, nor the Woody Allen style, nor Paris by Woody Allen –Everybody says I Love You And Midnight in Paris rather vaccinated us on that side. No, the superstar of Stroke of luck, it’s Melvil Poupaud! Brilliant and hilarious as a Machiavellian bourgeois orchestrating the loss of his young and pretty wife’s romantic lover, scheming with Yugoslav gangsters between a hunting trip in a Barbour and an electric train session. Except that Stroke of luck wants to be less a performance film than a well-set thriller in a postcard Paris and that’s where it gets stuck. Contrary to Rifkin’s Festival, the previous Woody, the postcard here conceals neither cruelty, nor biting, nor irony – and it takes a superhuman effort to consider as ironic a situation where the mother-in-law (Valérie Lemercier) living abroad, in need of French food, exclaims with joy at the restaurant “Ah! here is my foie gras! » upon seeing his plate arrive. In terms of cinema, Allen’s change of scenery in Paris is reduced to this series of bourgeois clichés (on which there is no perspective, no irony, we repeat) far from the fantasized and ghostly vision that the filmmaker projected on New York. In fact, with the appearance of Bruno Gouery as an armchair conspirator, Stroke of luck looks more like a not very successful spin-off ofEmily in Paris, the series that the whole world loves. We are not sure that Stroke of luck has the same impact.
Of Woody Allen. With Niels Schneider, Melvil Poupaud, Lou de Laagence… Duration 1h33. Released September 27, 2023
