Review of Woody Allen’s Lucky Strike

Not every trip of the famous American director and screenwriter to Europe turned out well. This time though Allen filmed with French actors in French and the result is a charming variation on the familiar themes of his most famous works such as Crimes and misdemeanors from 1989. That is, investigating the fact that a monster can hide in ice cream.

When Fanny runs into Alain, a former college classmate, in the opening scene, it’s clear to any Allen viewer that she’s not going to stick with a fling. An idealistic young man trying to make it as a writer first takes the girl out to lunch. Then the meeting increases.

Meanwhile, Fanny already lived with a similar carefree bohemian. And after the divorce, she decided to take a different path in life. Her husband Jean is attentive, elegant and somewhat possessive. This busy businessman embraces his wife with love, but the tension is palpable from the first moment. Perhaps he could care for his favorite Ferrari or other shiny jewel that he owns with similar love.

Woody Allen often looks for representatives of characters that he would previously play himself, so that they resemble him in some way. However, it is hard to imagine that the alter ego would be the charming, enthusiastic Alain portrayed by Niels Schneider, a writer and intellectual, but the exact opposite of the bundle of tics and neuroses that the author’s heroes so often suffered from.

The French setting and language brought with it a slightly different tone. At first, the latter makes it possible to depict a love triangle, in which tension and lies increase, with insight and slyness. And which can’t turn out well. Until a twist comes that will show all the characters in a slightly different light.

Once again it is confirmed that Woody Allen is more suited to drama than comedy in the last two decades. The neurotic gags and jokes of his previous films often no longer seemed so fresh and original. But when he increases the tension with increasing footage in Hit by Luck, it works out great for him. As soon as the crime line penetrates into the film and some characters unexpectedly become self-proclaimed detectives, Allen masterfully oscillates on the edge of exaggeration and real tension in which life is at stake.

Between the lines, he thinks about the rules of romance, the nature of love, the conflict of reason and feelings in a love relationship. And at the same time, he enjoys constructing a plot, sometimes improbable, which is quite common in his films. However, it would be foolish to speculate, for example, whether some information important to this story would have appeared much earlier in the age of the Internet.

Allen made a film that ostentatiously does not belong in the Internet age. Rather, he struggles with the canon of French crime and romantic films, looking for the offered and unexpected links between these two genres, which are not as far from each other as it might seem. And the strength of its novelty lies in how exaggerated, yet believable, human all the characters are.

Husband Jean, played by Melvil Poupaud, could easily be a caricature of a businessman who does not hesitate to get into the biggest mud for personal gain. But his relationship with the woman is sincere, in his jealousy there is both ego and an appropriate portion of pain.

Fanny, played by Lou de Laâge, seems like a romantic soul. Although she has made a number of pragmatic decisions in her life, she refuses to give up her feelings. And her mother, obsessed with detective stories and details, quickly becomes an active character from a walking joke, whose actions quickly cease to be a comic accessory.

Lou de Laage hraje Fanny. | Photo: Gravier Productions

Although this time Woody Allen filmed in French, which according to his own words he does not have a particularly good command of, after a long time he managed to create strong living protagonists who at the same time look a bit like something from a novel or some film of the French new wave.

It is constantly evident that the screenwriter and director, like a sly puppeteer, leads the heroes along unexpected but clearly thought-out routes. It is the obviousness with which even the most morbid acts take place here that makes Hit by Luck such a remarkable spectacle. Thanks to this, Allen surprises not only with plot twists, but also forces the audience to ask moral questions.

French director Jean-Luc Godard said in the 1960s that all you need to make a movie is a woman and a gun. Allen works with these “basic” ingredients of cinematography with joy, skill and wit.

These transformations of the serious into the frivolous, the coincidence into the accident, the joke into the drama, are the reason why Woody Allen’s fiftieth and quite possibly the last picture is more than a dignified end to a prolific career.