Si Dieu n'existe pas, tout est permis

Rating: 6/10 (22 April 2017)

Top tennis players are not generally notable culture-vultures- Jim Courier was allegedly much teased by his fellow-professionals for his habit of reading literary fiction such as Armistead Maupin's "Tales of the City" in the locker room- so heaven knows what the men's tour would have made of Chris Wilton, the central figure of this film, with his love of Dostoyevsky, Modernist art and Grand Opera.
As the film opens, Chris, who hates the stress of touring and realises he will never be a Grand Slam champion, has retired from professional tennis and is working as a coach at an exclusive London tennis club. Drawn together by their shared love of opera, he befriends a young man named Tom Hewett, one of his pupils at the club. Tom introduces Chris to his wealthy family, and before long everything seems to be going his way. Chris ends up married to Tom's sister Chloe and is given a job as an executive in the family firm.
"Match Point" was written and directed by Woody Allen, but during the first half it bears little resemblance to what we have come to think of as a "Woody Allen film". It is set in London rather than New York, none of the characters are Jewish- Woody himself does not appear- and it contains little or no humour. For much of its length it resembles nothing so much as a melodramatic soap opera set among the moneyed classes, "Westenders" rather than "Eastenders". Despite his marriage, Chris cannot resist having an affair with Tom's ex-girlfriend Nola, a beautiful but struggling American actress. Nola, however, is not content with a mere affair. She wants Chris to divorce Chloe and marry her. He does not want to do any such thing but manages to string Nola along by making promises he has no intention of keeping. Matters come to a head when Nola reveals that she is pregnant and threatens to inform Chloe about the affair.
It is at this point that "Match Point" starts to resemble a Woody film, one Woody film in particular- "Crimes and Misdemeanors" from 1989, which also dealt with a successful professional man threatened by an inconvenient mistress. In this case Chris, who knows that a divorce would jeopardise his job and his social position, reaches the same conclusion as did Judah in the earlier film- his mistress must die. He comes up with an elaborate scheme to kill Nola and make it look as though she was killed by a burglar.
Like "Crimes and Misdemeanors" , "Match Point" can be seen as Woody's debate with the spirit of Dostoyevsky over the themes of his "Crime and Punishment", the novel which Chris is seen reading. Like Dostoyevsky's anti-hero Raskolnikov, both Chris and Judah are atheists and, whereas many people without religious beliefs nevertheless have strong moral principles, they take the view that "Si Dieu n'existe pas, tout est permis". They believe that, if necessity so dictates, any crime, up to and including murder, can be justified.
Self-plagiarism is not always a good idea unless one can equal (or, better still, improve upon) one's previous effort, and I am afraid that here Woody falls a long way short of equalling the success he had with "Crimes and Misdemeanors" (in my view one of his greatest films), still less of improving on it. This is only partly because Jonathan Rhys Meyers as Chris is not nearly as good as Martin Landau, who played Judah. "Crimes and Misdemeanors" is a much more complex film in which the bleakness of the "Judah" plot is counterbalanced by a more positive viewpoint put forward by Sam Waterston's rabbi and by a lighter tragi-comic subplot involving Woody himself as one of his trademark neurotic worriers and which contains a good deal of humour. As he demonstrated in "September" (in my view one of his worst films), Woody does not always handle high seriousness unrelieved by humour very well.
"Match Point" is at least better than "September", for two reasons. The first is that some of the acting is good, especially from Scarlett Johansson as Nola, a tragic figure who genuinely loves Chris and cannot quite accept that he is only using her for sex. (She prefers to believe that he is emotionally torn between her and Chloe, but the truth is that Chris does not love either woman and is only using Chloe for her family's money). Johannsson was a late replacement for Kate Winslet who was originally cast in the role but dropped out.
The second reason is the film's ending. Chris has always believed in the importance of luck, comparing life to a tennis match in which a player can either win or lose a point depending on which side of the net the ball falls. The question of whether Chris will be found guilty of Nola's murder or escape scot-free depends upon a similar matter of chance- and there is a brilliant twist at the end, worthy of a great writer like O. Henry or Roald Dahl. The difference is that the twists produced by Henry and Dahl came as the climax to intriguing, economically-written short stories. Woody's twist comes as the climax to a meandering and at times rather dull long story. 6/10