Lucky Draw

Rating: 7/10 (29 December 2005)

How do you make a dense feature-length movie from a plot that holds in two lines? This rhetoric question is masterfully resolved in this Hitchcock-inspired thriller by a mature and quietly reflected director. Unsuccessful former tennis pro (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) weds into British upper class (Emily Mortimer et al.) by chance, has an affair with his brother-in-law's (Matthew Goode) raunchy mistress (Scarlett Johansson), has her pregnant by accident, then saves his marriage by killing her and, for sheer luck, gets away with it. End of story. Roll the credits. In Match Point, this skeleton of a story is actually just the pretext to a moody excursion into the nature of fate, as you will have easily guessed from the chance appendices in all actions described. Bar the psychological foray, this low-key and solemn account is highly untypical of Allen, who for once refrains from screw-balling and delivers instead a psycho classic in the vein of the unsurpassed Chabrol. Accordingly, Allen takes the freedom to develop his characters at length and let the narrative evolve in a natural, almost organic way, something unthinkable in modern-day screen drama, where black and white is the dominant code of portrayal. Admittedly, Match Point has numerous flaws, the most obvious being the outrageous clichés of London and all things British, but then again, whoever claims that Allen's Manhattan is the result of a naturalist depiction must be either a self-indulgent New Yorker or a downright fool (things identical, I guess). And yes, the film could have easily been shortened by some ten to fifteen minutes, the middle part  devoted to the emotional set-up for the crime  being a tad bit redundant. On the other hand, the recurring motif of Verdi's La Traviata, with its corollary: art  here, literally used as a reverse blueprint  beautifully carries the subplot, with a "diverted" pariah who, in the end, remains an outsider in a shallow society, itself a self-deluded meritocracy, where only an ephemeral stroke of luck could have brought him in  and will keep him there for good or for bad. Very solid cinema, to say the least, and a late blossom in Allen's career who, like others before him (but to name John Ford), shows there is no age for reinventing yourself.