Leads us up the garden path with twists and a cheeky resolution

Rating: 10/10 (13 May 2020)

This is veteran auteur, Woody Allen's thirty-somethingth annual film. Famous for early comic masterpieces such as 'The Sleeper', 'Bananas', 'Annie Hall' and 'Manhattan', his career suffered a setback around the 1990s when he became tainted with allegations of sexual misconduct. This coincided with the release of several weaker films and his box-offices dropped through the floor. More recently though, films such as 'The Curse of the Jade Scorpion' have resurrected Allen's reputation and 'Match Point' builds on this.
Notably, 'Match Point' is not set in Allen's beloved New York City, and nor does the writer-director appear in this movie. The film takes place in present day London (England) and centres on a young professional tennis player, Chris (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), who retires from the circuit to broaden his life, initially seeking employment as an instructor at an exclusive tennis club.
He soon falls in with an upper class family who provide him with romance, fine food and access to the opera; 'wine, women and song'. He is then at the manor, practising his shootin' ahead of the grouse season and becomes a highly-paid and chauffeured executive in the family business. But their smitten daughter, Chloe (Emily Mortimer), is a little cloying for Chris who has eyes for the son's fiancée, Nola (Scarlett Johansson).
The premise is that some people have good luck, as when a tennis ball hits the top of the net and goes over, or doesn't. Just how lucky Chris can be is the story Allen spins, making the upper-class characters decent and his 'working-class hero' almost amoral.
Allen has the power to command the world's best actors and the women are perfectly cast to deliver the characters he needs for this perverse fable. Scarlett Johansson plays a struggling American actor and Penelope Wilton is brilliant as the family's matriarch. The blokes, Rhys Meyers, Matthew Goode and Brian Cox are fine, too. These are great actors, superbly directed.
Allen exploits our prejudices to lead us up the garden path with playful wit, although not outright comedy, and this film is most reminiscent of his superb 'Crimes and Misdemeanours'. The twists and cheeky resolution are novel enough to reassure us that Woody Allen at seventy years of age still has plenty to offer in the area of entertainment.