A principle evident in Woody Allen's decades-long body of work is that there are forces in this world greater than our own efforts. His characters typically fail in spite of themselves, but in a manner often mined for humour and pathos as he is best known for his comedic outlook on life. On certain occasions, though, Allen has delved into drama and grappled with nihilistic dilemmas posed by his distress and unrest over whether or not God exists. Crimes And Misdemeanors is his most devastating and acclaimed of these departures, and Melinda And Melinda his most experimental. Premised on freely interpreting a single story through either a comic or a tragic lens, Melinda concluded that how we view the world depends on something as simple as our disposition. Considering Allen's collective output, one may wonder at his own disposition. At times gently self-mocking and at others angrily yet helplessly wondering why bad things happen to good people, and vice versa, Allen has long straddled both spheres. As such, I can't help but wonder at his present frame of mind because Match Point, his latest film, is relentlessly grim, morally terrifying, and arguably devoid of comedic interpretation. Furthermore, it is also tellingly one of the sanest, most vivid and self-assured films in his entire canon.

Set in London, the film follows Chris (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), a former tennis pro turned instructor from Dublin who strikes a friendship with a student of his named Tom (Matthew Goode) and becomes surreptitiously insinuated into his wealthy family after he meets his sister, Chloe (Emily Mortimer). Chris and Chloe glom onto one another rather quickly but we sense that their sincerity is dubious; this isn't love at first sight but rather opportunity knocking. As fortune would have it, Tom and Chloe's parents take to Chris, and their father lands him an estimable corporate position in one of his businesses. What luck! Tom, meanwhile, is engaged to an American student named Nola (Scarlett Johansson) who has relocated across the Atlantic in order to pursue a career in acting. She appears used to luxury at first, poised and assured with the sort of potent sexual maturity Scarlett Johansson is renown for playing, but once we get to know her better we see she is ravenous for excitement and just a little bit impressionable. Her youth betrays her, and when a wandering Chris provides opportunity for lustful adventure she listens.

What follows is not the sort of outcome one might expect from this set-up. Allen cleverly builds tension around our presumptions and creates genuine suspense by challenging our ideas of morality and justice. For someone like Chris with the stakes being as high as they are (Chloe and her family, a high salary, his lavish accoutrements), he risks a resounding failure in his pursuit of Nola, especially when her reckless impatience openly threatens to expose his infidelity and ruin his lifestyle. But Chris is already a man who succeeds in spite of himself, and his luck prevails in spite of his moral failures. Even when he is haunted by the ghosts of his indiscretions who've come to chasten him, in a scene reminiscent of Ingmar Bergman's Fanny & Alexander where Alexander's enforced guilt at the hands of his repressive stepfather's spirit seems to signal a life of divine retribution, their otherworldly portent is empty and usurped because it can be. Indeed, Allen is merciless, refusing to yield a single moment's grace, which is precisely his dread-laden point. We can choose our actions, take great pains to guarantee the outcomes, and even err anyway, but in the end we have no control; all is luck.

While Crimes And Misdemeanors is an obvious precursor and thematic companion piece to Match Point, the two are quite distinct. Though both films portray evil acts borne of convenience, the former is a meditation on the stain of sin that finds uneasy laughs as it plumbs the depths of the human soul. As a masterful exercise in self-reflexivity, it invites audiences to question their own wills and motives. The latter, by contrast, is a decidedly dark and sickeningly serious thriller about the cosmic indifference of luck, much less equivocal than Crimes but more bare fact about the dominion of chance over the best, or worst, of our intentions.

Coming from the generally lackadaisical Allen, Match Point can be read as a snarling invective against his own career. He knows a thing or two about luck himself; spurious of his gifts as a filmmaker and no doubt stung by a string of commercial flops and critical backlash, if asked Allen would likely attribute any lasting success to happenstance. Endlessly chasing after such cinematic heroes as Bergman, Federico Fellini, and Humphrey Bogart, Allen has confessed to feeling inferior, yet he forges ahead anyway year after year with all-new films that are each entertaining if not important to some degree. After a film like Match Point, easily one of his best after nearly forty films, I hope his luck never runs out.

(Match Point is currently playing at the Crystal Palace 8 Cinemas, located at 499 Paul St. in Dieppe.)