Pure luck for Woody Allen fans
The 50th film of the director who sang New York may also turn out to be the last
2023 is undoubtedly the year of cinema veterans. Martin Scorsese, 81, with Killers of the Flower Moon; Ridley Scott, 86, with “Napoleon”; Hayao Miyazaki, 82, with “The Boy and the Heron”, Roman Polanski, 90, with “The Palace”… This list also includes 88-year-old Woody Allen – not only one of the most dignified by age, but also the most -productive directors in general. This week we’re looking at his 50th feature film. Since 1966, he has shot one almost every year, and nothing can stop him – not even the “cancel” (cancel in English) that American producers, distributors, and viewers arranged for him after the accusations of his stepdaughter Dylan and his ex-wife Mia Farrow. So the director, screenwriter, and actor, who was nominated for 24 Oscars and won four of them, found himself in the role of exile in Europe, although – unlike Polanski – the court did not find him guilty of any of the offenses with which he is blamed by the media and his relatives.
But with Woody, it’s always about who has the last laugh. It’s like that in his chatty movie plots, it’s like that in real life. This September, the Venice Film Festival welcomed his “Pure Luck”. It is pure luck that Vlado Trifonov, who died a month later, the engine and programmer of “Kinomania”, for whom Alan was a favorite director (along with Almodovar), ensured its recent projection on the Bulgarian screen.
In interviews with the Spanish press, Woody recently vowed that this fiftieth film would be his last. In this case, “Pure Luck” would be a fitting farewell. Not because he is persona non grata in his homeland, the director has recently created weak films such as “The Rifkin Festival”, “Autumn Day in New York” or “You will meet a tall dark-haired Stranger”. His new one, filmed in France, with French actors and entirely in French, is surely his best achievement in the last ten years – if we count from Blue Jasmine. But perhaps it is even the best since “Matchpoint” (2005), with which the author himself compares it thematically.
Traditionally, Allen relies on snappy dialogue, moderate irony, a casual love story, and heavy acting names. This time it will be without the latter – unless Melville Pupo (who also played in a Bulgarian film) and Valéry Lemercier can pass for those. But the film explodes with criminal intrigue and its moral consequences, to the sounds of Herbie Hancock’s Cantaloupe Island and a hauntingly beautiful autumn Paris, shot by cinematographer legend Vittorio Storaro (“Apocalypse Now”, “The Last Emperor”), with whom the director is inseparable in its last five productions.
This is not unfamiliar territory for Woody, who sang of his native New York in his best films of the 70s and 80s. He docked in the city-endless holiday back in 2011 for “Midnight in Paris” (highest grosser of his long career), and then messed around on the Cote d’Azur “Midnight Magic”. The delicate Lou de Laage is a young Parisian married to a rich man with a dark past, whose life passes between cocktails, art galleries, auction houses, and expensive soirées. By chance, on the street, she runs into her classmate from the French high school in New York, a bohemian who lives in an attic… And then – clearly: this is a Woody Allen film, wherein a light, sarcastic style they will tell us about love, infidelity, loss, crime, and retribution.
It’s not the originality, but the comfort of the familiar that keeps us coming back to Woody Allen’s movies again and again. Characters resemble other characters; stories remind other stories; the atmosphere is impossible to mistake. Even in his weakest works, the neurotic New Yorker demonstrates an unrivaled talent for not taking himself too seriously and being an incurable romantic. In “Pure Luck” his trademarks intersect with a typically French attitude to interpersonal (and intersex) relationships, to the beautiful, to the unexpected. This makes the film champagne, makes it lighter and tastier to watch, and if we add the merciful brevity of Udialan’s productions (in this case 93 minutes) – it’s just a lottery win. Added value to the humor for us is also the episodic images of the two Romanian faces for wet orders – they could easily have been Bulgarian as well.
No, Pure Luck is not Annie Hall, Hannah and Her Sisters, or The Purple Rose of Cairo, not even close. But as with any Woody Allen film, whether it’s a biting comedy or a crime drama, you leave the cinema in a good mood. What’s better than the holidays?
