Exactly who are these people? They’re rich, obviously. They’re Parisian, which means that they are already fantasy figurines in the European curiosity shop of Woody Allen’s imagination. But does an…
“I make my own luck,” says the mysteriously rich Jean whenever the subject arises: when he discovers a lottery ticket in his wife Fanny’s pocket, for example. That luck includes his career, which he describes as making rich people richer “which is difficult, so I help them,” but extends to his marriage to the considerably younger Fanny , an accomplished art auctioneer.
Fanny does wonder whether she might be seen as a trophy wife, but doesn’t object to being controlled in a way that is now legally recognized as abuse. But this isn’t really now: it’s 1923-1953 WoodyWorld, where Jean’s intrusiveness is significant only because it presents an obstacle to the affair Fanny is about to have. When she bumps into old schoolmate Alain in the street, he immediately tells her he has been harboring a crush on her since they were teenagers.
The film also looks superb. Cinematographer Vittorio Storaro opens up spaces – the interior of the Fourniers’ apartment, which is ingeniously unfolded before us to show the expanse of several rooms at once – before snapping them shut, following the characters closely through corridors that become as confining as rat-races, or the rails of the vintage model railway, squeezed into one of the apartment’s rooms, that Jean likes to show off to visitors. It is the visual language of paranoia.
Piano grooves and Storaro’s inventiveness cannot compensate, however, for this film’s lazy writing. Bits of business make no sense – lines from one scene are repeated almost verbatim in the next; Fanny, in common with too many of Woody’s women, is largely a blank. De Laage works hard at evoking the magically attractive presence Jean claims she has, but she is hardly more than a beautiful cipher, less trophy wife than trophy actress.
You could say that Woody lucked out with Poupaud, although he would probably respond that he made his own luck there. And as with the ghastly – which was hailed in its day as a return to form and was a hit, despite the merry hell it played with its English setting – he may even be lucky enough to find that this divertissement will slip down as easily as a macaron.
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