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.”
