2024-04-12 16:01:23
Maybe you have to imagine the nature and late work of Woody Allen as the piece of music with which you come out of the cinema whistling softly after turning fiftieth – because you can’t get rid of it, because it’s stuck in your head and ears and maybe saw the last film. “A stroke of luck” is what it’s called. The piece of music that strolls weightlessly through Allen’s social crime comedy is called “Cantaloupe Island”.
Herbie Hancock wrote it in 1964, the year in which Woody Allen arrived in Paris for the first time and fell in love with the city on the Seine and with the jazz that was flourishing there, and finally with the films of Truffaut and Godard and Malle. It uses about as many chords (F minor, D flat major, D minor) as Allen did with themes (jealousy, coincidence, crime) in his late work.
It is – for a 24-year-old, who was Hancock in 1964 – of the same age-related sausageiness towards his present, which at that time was still rather distant from funk, as that of the 88-year-old Woody Allen towards the debates about the cancellation of his work and the calls for a boycott collaboration with him.
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For more than three decades, Allen has lived with allegations from his ex-wife Mia Farrow that he abused his then seven-year-old adopted daughter Dylan. Which is not proven. There is still no court ruling on this. Which still results in and – like “Rifkin’s Festival”, his truly terrible 49th film – reaching audience numbers in theaters that are roughly on par with twelve-hour documentaries about Mongolian yurt poets of the early 20th century.
Woody Allen – also because he was long past the retirement age of German detectives at the beginning of the debate – has developed an almost Hancock-esque wurstiness over the years. Being canceled, he just said again, isn’t so bad after all. Who wants to be part of the current culture in the USA?
And in the meantime the debate, which, like all debates of recent times, is not alien to anything human (especially not a human abyss), seems to have achieved a similar equanimity and – it is no longer young – has approached one of the most beautiful human conditions – the mildness of old age. Not to mention old age wisdom.
Herbie Hancocks “Cantaloupe Island”
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In Cannes, where “Coup de Chance”, the original title of Allen’s French swan song, was shown, twenty women – according to people who were there – stripped and – as they say – naked and demonstrated almost ritually for the fact that “A stroke of luck” wasn’t allowed to get a palm tree, which was stupid because Allen’s film wasn’t even in the competition.
He wouldn’t have gotten one – afterwards you’re always smarter, especially as a demonstrator, well most of the time. Because the fatal story of Fanny and Alain and Jean is in no way like Hancock’s “Cantaloupe Island”, at least in one way. She won’t become a legend.
Now we need to move on to the next analogy that Woody Allen puts forward to help us compare his late work with things he casually placed in Coup de Chance. You have to imagine Woody Allen’s late work like the toy train that is Jean’s pride and joy (and is so gigantic that Horst Seehofer would be green with envy in his basement).
Niels Schneider and Lou de Laâge are Alain and Fanny
Quelle: ©2022 Gravier Productions, Inc.
Woody Allen’s late work is – apart from a few embarrassments like “Rifkin’s Festival” – a masterpiece of precision engineering. Once set in motion, Allen’s clockwork always runs with the same built-in complications and with astonishing consistency.
Now we’ve already talked quite a bit about Jean and Fanny and Alain. The story goes like this: Fanny is married to Jean. She is young and beautiful and works in an auction house. Which she didn’t have to. Jean is fabulously rich because he makes rich people even richer, which he in turn does – there are rumors – using not entirely clean means and quite unscrupulously. His former partner is said to have paid for this with his life.
But Fanny doesn’t really want to know all that. She feels like a trophy, claims to have remained a rebel and therefore independent at heart, and is thoroughly bored in the society of the French upper class. One day she runs into Alain, who she went to the same (French) school with in New York.
And Miss Marple is there too
Alain, who now lives as a writer in an attic apartment that is about to be awarded the “Poor Poet Prize,” was madly in love with her, he says. They quote Jacques Prevert on the street. She keeps nervously wiping her hair out of her face. He constantly stirs up the warm air with his arms.
What has to happen happens. Alain and Fanny come together. Jean finds out. Alain disappears. And Fanny’s mother – actually Jean’s biggest fan, but also a notorious reader of murder and manslaughter stories – discovers the Miss Marple in herself.
It’s autumn in the Jardin du Luxembourg. Woody Allen’s characters come onto the screen in such a clichéd way and paper from his 1954 Olympic typewriter like statues of nymphs from a plasterer’s shop on the Seine between the trees (Jean is wearing Günter Grass’s corduroy suit, Fanny, the ex-existentialist, still has one fatal tendency towards turtleneck sweaters, now they are white and red and no longer black).
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The rich get off badly, the men too, the women are adorable. “A stroke of luck” confronts social reality, the real present, with a rebellious sausageiness.
Woody Allen does his own thing, letting his Märklin railway run in new circles. You can then watch these scents on the outdoor screen in the summer. And afterwards you wish Woody Allen a happy retirement and – pursued by bloodthirsty insects – whistle Herbie Hancock. Not a bad perspective.
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