The revolution begins at home in Coup!, an energetic, bantamweight drama from directors Austin Stark and Joseph Schuman that brings down the curtain on this year’s Venice Days sidebar at the film festival. Specifically, in this case, it begins at the seaside home of JC Horton (Billy Magnussen), a crusading leftist journalist at the time of the 1918 Spanish flu.
Horton bashes his typewriter keys in a righteous fury. Sheltering on his estate, he reports on life inside the plague-ridden city, describing the brave proletariats and the brutal police officers; the bodies heaped in the street and the rain of billy clubs upon heads. His wife turns the pages and is suitably impressed. She says: “It does feel like you were really there.”
Just as the great journalist never actually sets foot away from posh Edgar Island, neither does Coup!, which has far less money than Horton but arguably more ingenuity, throwing open the doors of its single location in an effort to allow the real world inside. This duly arrives in the form of Floyd Monk, the new cook at Horton’s mansion, who is played with lip-smacking relish by Peter Sarsgaard.
Monk announces his arrival in a molasses-thick southern accent that can probably be heard several counties away. He wears a pair of flamboyant earrings that jiggle with each step and a hat that has seemingly been decorated with flattened birds and damp shells. He claims to be a big fan of the famous Horton, but his gushing admiration carries with it the dancing air of mockery.
Having established Horton’s strictly quarantined house as a microcosm of the class struggle in the US, the drama that follows largely writes itself. Authority must be challenged; hypocrisy exposed. Sure enough, Monk wastes little time in whipping the below-stairs staff into an insurrectionist froth, much to the outrage of Horton, who has always prided himself on being such an accommodating employer.
The film is fun, broad and exuberant, like a primetime Marxist sitcom, although it does feel indebted to a number of recent, better films around the same theme. At one stage, scheming to remove Horton’s redoubtable housekeeper, Monk chooses to poison the woman, much as the interlopers poisoned the superefficient housekeeper from Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite. Here, though, the poison makes the servant instantly, violently ill. She pukes over the diners in a scene that recalls the infamous centrepiece of Triangle of Sadness.
The idiotic Horton plans to run as a candidate for the newly formed progressive party and then one day, fingers crossed, take a seat in the Senate. But no sooner has he hatched his plan than he is hoisted by his own petard – undone by a magazine article that exposes him as “the face of fraud” and left to blunder, bewildered, into the traps Monk has laid.
Stark and Schuman’s film deserves a better fate, because it is bright and assured and thoroughly enjoyable in the moment, even if its line of satire feels glib and its anger ever so slightly concocted, like one of Horton’s own polemics, which he likes to work on while staring out at the ocean, contentedly puffing away on his pipe.