Sand if Lou de Laâge had gone to the hairdresser she would have played the part. The 33-year-old French actress, who throughout her long career – yes, he has been working since he was 10 – he has had more than one period in which he wore his hair à la garçonne, he didn’t imagine – when her agent called her to ask her to confirm the length of her hair – that the request came from the author of the script which a few days later would briefly pass over his desk (“for 3 hours and no more and with a guy at the door who takes it back immediately afterwards”): Woody Allen.
You can’t refuse a stroke of luck from Woody Allen
The liturgy would also have been respected for WASP number 50 (all the films of the New York auteur are identified, while still in progress, with the acronym Woody Allen Summer Project, given that he always shoots in the summer): «Then I received a letter, in which Woody Alèn (the pronunciation of the radiant Bordeaux is delightful, ed.) told me that he had seen extracts from my films and that he wanted to offer me a role. I felt like a child, I would never have dreamed of something like this. She wrote to me that she was looking for a young woman who contained within herself a mélange of fragility and passion, who could prove to be a hothead when necessary, letting herself go completely.”
The film in cinemas on December 6th
In Coup de Chance – Stroke of luck (at the cinema on 6 December), de Laâge – a scream of Frenchness, hair now gathered in a ponytail and, we imagine, from now on at most subjected to slight trimming for good luck – she is a trophy wife, like many are seen in American films.
Lou de Laage in “The Dance of the Squares” (2021) based on the novel of the same name by Victoria Mas. © Amazon Prime Video / Courtesy Everett Collection
Elegant, impeccable and bored, she divides her time between an elegant office and the luxurious mansions – Parisian and country – of her rich husband, played by Melvil Poupaud, an actor who, like her, started early and at 23 was already working with Eric Rohmer in One boy, three girlscarefully building a career equally divided between romantic and rock’n’roll (“but for some time Melvil has specialized in roles as an evil manipulator” she explains, referring to L’amour et les forests by Valerie Donzelli, in which he victimizes Virgine Efira).
Lou de Laâge in a scene from Woody Allen’s “Coup de Chance”, with actor Neils Schneider. (Press Office)
A leap in time
The meeting with an old schoolmate, Neils Schneider, a penniless writer but driven by sincere passions (her husband’s job, on the other hand, consists of “making the rich even richer”), turns the clock back to a different time , in which happiness was a butter and ham baguette to share in the park. The clock of Lou de Laâge, who in Italy we saw alongside Juliette Binoche in The wait by Piero Messina and that we could soon see again in the TV series Étoile, runs fast.
«Until recently I was only offered sad and tortured characters. I loved them all, they made me who I am today, they forced me to come into contact with deep emotions »she said, before appropriating lighter registers. At the dawn of the #Metoo movement, then, she settled on very French positions (Catherine Deneuve had not expressed herself differently): «It would be deplorable if men could no longer court. As long as it is done with elegance. Seduction and feminism are not incompatible.” No surprise when you ask her “Would you like to work in America?” that the answer is: «I would be happy, but I have a tendency not to delude myselfthe. And not to chase impossible projects. I have a bad relationship with frustrations. And I don’t really want to imagine the future. As I got older I freed myself from unnecessary anxieties. There’s no point in forcing life, it’s better to let yourself be surprised.”
A stroke of luck, “As long as it works”
Did you allow yourself to be influenced by Allenian philosophy? There’s no point in getting busy, we’re at the mercy of chance…
«Of chance and desire. I indulged mine. I was five or six years old when my mother took me to the theater for the first time. I have no memory of it, but the story was often mentioned in the family, considering how it ended… At the end, she tells me that I would have told her: “Well, this is what I want to do in life.” And it was theatre, not cinema. I was looking for that sense of communion that is created with others in a space without judgment, where nothing is serious and everything is creative. And I found it: a fantasy that turned out to live up to reality. Cinema came later. But I believe it, I still believe it. That’s why I like working with people who don’t take themselves too seriously, who don’t make a fuss, who don’t feel like they’re saving the world. I don’t feel like a serious person, it would be a shame to do this job and not be childish.”
A Frenchwoman and a New Yorker
Did you manage not to be serious on the set of your first American film?
«In part it was very serious, but it was also a bit like playing. With Woody you can do whatever you want, he tells you: «Change the lines if they don’t convince you, even adapt the dialogues to make them more fluid, the costumes if they don’t seem good to you. But I don’t like lipstick, so please don’t wear that.” But in the end we didn’t change anything and he wondered why. And then I replied: “Because you write better than we speak.” There’s a rhythm to his writing that I think comes from the fact that he’s a musician. And nothing is as it seems: at the beginning, reading the script, we couldn’t clarify whether we were in a thriller, a romantic comedy, a tragedy, or a comedy film. Only when we saw the finished film did we understand that it was all in one. Just like life, which is a mélange. In the tragic there is always the comic.” Have you ever laughed at a funeral? Yes to me. In Woody’s films there is always something absurd, a concentration of the strangeness of life. Who else can make people laugh by showing two murderers carrying a handsome, murdered boy in a sack?”
Woody Allen on the set of Coup de Chance
A calm director on set
Fifty films have helped build the legend of Woody Allen. Confirm everything?
«There was never a single stressful moment on set. She is the most humble person I have ever met: she says she has never made masterpieces, but I think this is not the case. It’s probably not false modesty, I think he’s really convinced of it. He speaks softly, you have to get closer to hear him. And it was very nice to see him and Vittorio Storaro, two geniuses who, like two children, thanked each other for their respective good ideas.
He told me: “It will be the simplest film you’ve ever made.” And it was like that. Tragic that it will not be distributed in the USA due to the scandal of the alleged molestation of his daughter Dylan. I think it’s crazy and I’m sad for them that they won’t see the film. Woody even agreed to take a lie detector test (and two judicial investigations ruled that there was no place to proceed, ed.). I can’t believe Americans don’t trust their justice system. But he loves his work so much that he has found a way to continue doing it: and at his age, getting up at five, eating in the canteen and making a film in a language he doesn’t understand I don’t think is easy. Fortunately, his films have not stopped being successful in France. We love psychoanalysis and Woody’s films are full of it, brilliant jokes and existential dialogue. Bread for our teeth.
The French bourgeois in the film seem even more perverse than the Americans, on the other hand
“Finds? They were already notable in Match Point. Those were English. Okay, Europeans are perverse. Maybe this is why Woody Alèn loves making his films here so much.
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