Sacré Bleu! Woody Allen Plans French-Language Drama As His 50th Film

Woody Allen is planning to create his 50th film as a director with a French-language production to be shot in Paris.

What Happened: The 86-year-old Allen is planning to begin production in September with a French cast. Allen stated the film will be financed from U.S. sources, but Variety cited an unnamed “source close to the project” that claimed financing on the $10 million production was not yet secured.

Variety noted that Allen told the French newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche the new film will be “in the same vein as ‘Match Point,’ a sort of poisonous romantic thriller” — a reference to his 2005 film that was shot in London.

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Why It Matters: Allen’s commercial viability had long rested on his ability to turn out small films with big-name casts that were quickly able to recover their low budgets. In 2019, he hit a roadblock when Amazon AMZN canceled its contract with Allen and refused to release his 2019 feature “A Rainy Day in New York” after his estranged adopted daughter Dylan Farrow gained new attention for repeating her allegations that Allen molested her when she was a child.

Allen always denied the accusations and was never criminally charged with an assault.

No Hollywood studio would touch “A Rainy Day in New York” and it was released in the U.S. in 2021 by MVD Entertainment Group, a small independent outfit that also brought his 2020 Spanish-lensed “Rifkin’s Festival” to a brief U.S. release earlier this year. No distributor has been attached to Allen’s planned French film.

Photo: Raffi Asdourian / Flickr Creative Commons

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