Woody Allen Doesn’t Know What It Means to Be Canceled

Like it or not, Woody Allen is back at Venice. The controversial filmmaker received a mixed welcome at the Venice International Film Festival on Monday: Attendees at a press conference reportedly spontaneously applauded for him, and his film, Coup de Chance, received a five-minute standing ovation. At the same time, protesters reportedly gathered outside the film’s premiere, criticizing the festival for giving him a platform. 

Allen’s appearance at Venice marks his first major film festival appearance since 2016, when he premiered Cafe Society at Cannes. Allen has largely retreated from the public eye in the years since. In 2014, Dylan Farrow—his adopted daughter with ex-partner Mia Farrow—wrote an open letter in which she accused Allen of sexually assaulting her when she was a child, an allegation first made in 1992, when she was seven years old. Allen has repeatedly denied the allegations; he has never been charged with a crime. “It’s so preposterous and yet the smear has remained and they still prefer to cling to if not the notion that I molested Dylan, then the possibility that I molested her,” Allen told Lee Cowan in an interview on CBS Sunday Morning in 2021. “Nothing that I ever did with Dylan in my life could be misconstrued as that.”

At the Venice Film Festival press conference, the 87-year-old auteur reflected on his life and his career. “I have been very, very lucky. I have been lucky my whole life,” said Allen, according to Deadline. “I had two loving parents and good friends. I have a wonderful wife and marriage, two children,” he added, referring to his wife, Soon-Yi Previn, another of Mia Farrow’s adopted children, whom Allen married in 1997, when she was 27 years old and he was 62. Allen and Previn have two daughters, Bechet Allen and Manzie Tio Allen.

Allen’s Coup de Chance is a French-language thriller that stars actors Lou de Laâge, Valérie Lemercier, Melvil Poupaud, and Niels Schneider. The film, which premiered out of competition, follows a married couple, Fanny and Jean, whose seemingly perfect lives in Paris get upended when Fanny falls in love with an old schoolmate, Alain. Despite not speaking any French, Allen had no misgivings about directing a film entirely in another language. “If you watch a Japanese film, you can tell if the acting is good, realistic and natural or if it’s dramatic and silly, or too exaggerated,” Allen said. “The same thing here. I could tell by the body language and the emotion of the actors without understanding the language, when they were being realistic, and they weren’t.”

Allen said he was inspired to make the film in French due to his enduring love of European cinema. “When I was younger the films that were most impressive to us when we were all starting out and aiming to be filmmakers were European cinema, all the French films, Italian films, Swedish films,” he said. “We all wanted to make films like Europeans.” In the wake of Dylan Farrow’s renewed allegations, several major American stars have said they regret working with Allen in the past, and would not work with him again. In 2019, Allen and Amazon settled a lawsuit the director brought against the company after it scuttled a four-picture deal it had signed with Allen.

In an interview with Variety published over the weekend, Allen was asked if he feels as though he’s been canceled. “I feel if you’re going to be canceled, this is the culture to be canceled by,” Allen said in response. “I just find that all so silly. I don’t think about it. I don’t know what it means to be canceled.”

Coup de Chance reportedly received a five-minute standing ovation from attendees at Venice. But while Allen and his film were generally well-received at the festival, both also attracted vocal detractors. Per The Hollywood Reporter, about 20 protesters took off their shirts and marched past the Venice premiere of Coup de Chance, shouting phrases including “no rape culture,” “a rapist is not a sick man, he is the healthy son of patriarchy,” and “no spotlight for rapist directors.” The protest reportedly began when Allen stepped onto the red carpet, and lasted for only a few minutes before it was broken up by police.