(Paris) Kept away from cinema in the United States since the #metoo movement, Woody Allen is trying his luck in Europe: his 50e film, in theaters Wednesday, is the first filmed in French in Paris with a completely tricolor cast, from Valérie Lemercier to Niels Schneider.
Stroke of luck is a French comedy in which the touch of Woody Allen shines through, like Match Point : its characters love and betray each other in the beautiful neighborhoods of Paris, through a variation on love and chance.
The 87-year-old filmmaker, who has so often appeared in the films he writes, playing a depressive intellectual character with acerbic humor and full of self-deprecation, does not appear on screen this time.
He leaves his place to French interpreters: Fanny (Lou de Laagence) and Jean (Melvil Poupaud) are a couple of upper-class people who seem to succeed in everything. He is a touchy man, she sometimes feels cramped in a daily life of social receptions and hunting trips.
Fanny will come across by chance her childhood sweetheart, Alain, played by Niels Schneider, a writer who leads a more bohemian existence, letting herself be carried away by the flow and starting a relationship with him.
Valérie Lemercier brings a dose of fantasy by playing Fanny’s mother, who is the first to suspect their affair and precipitate events.
“Like a European”
Working with French actors was not difficult, assured Woody Allen at the Venice Film Festival, where the film was presented at the beginning of September out of competition, explaining that the interpreters could speak to him in English.
As for directing them, “just with the body language and the emotions of the actors, I can realize if they are fair or not,” he assured.
“We had heard that Woody directed very little” his actors, “that was not the case at all,” added Lou de Laage. “Woody knew very well what he had written. Musicality is the same in all languages when it comes to truth.”
Filming in Europe is far from being a first for the New York filmmaker, who has already set up his camera in London, Rome or Barcelona, as well as in the City of Lights, in Midnight in Paris (2011), but with a tricolor and Anglo-Saxon distribution.
“I felt like a real European director. I saw all these films years ago, by Truffaut, Godard, Resnais, Renoir, I wanted to belong to this group, and make films in French. I did it ! “, said Woody Allen in Venice.
Master of comedy and social satire, multi-awarded, Allen in any case finds on this side of the Atlantic a platform of which he is now deprived in his native country.
The director ofAnnie Hall, Manhattan Or Blue Jasmine almost no longer runs in the United States, and success in theaters has become rarer.
Above all, it has become for some one of the symbols of sexual violence. Woody Allen saw almost the entire profession turn its back on him in the United States after accusations of sexual assault launched by Dylan Farrow, whom he adopted as a child with his ex-wife Mia Farrow.
However, he is not worried or prosecuted by the courts. And no investigation into sexual assault concerning him has been successful.
Asked about the possibility of filming in his city again, he preferred to joke: “I have very good ideas for New York! If guys come out of the shadows and say OK, we’ll finance your film […] If people are crazy enough” for that, “then I’ll make a film in New York!” “.