French Exit
Directed by: Azazel Jacobs
Written by: Patrick DeWitt
Starring: Michelle Pfeiffer, Lucas Hedges, Valerie Mahaffey, Imogen Poots, Susan Coyne, Danielle Macdonald, Isaach De Bankolé, Daniel di Tomasso, Eddie Holland, Tracy Letts
Comedy/Drama - 110 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 10 Feb 2021
Written by: Patrick DeWitt
Starring: Michelle Pfeiffer, Lucas Hedges, Valerie Mahaffey, Imogen Poots, Susan Coyne, Danielle Macdonald, Isaach De Bankolé, Daniel di Tomasso, Eddie Holland, Tracy Letts
Comedy/Drama - 110 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 10 Feb 2021
She’s not like us. According to literature and film, she exists, but I have never met anyone like her. Then again, her financial status ensures we do not share the same air too often. She was famous among Manhattan socialites for being odd. She was both part of their club, but not in it. She didn’t play their games - she was above them. Little is known of her early years, but it’s an educated guess she was born into wealth and married for money. There is no explanation how she can be wantonly cruel to her fellow man one second, and magnanimous the next. She may have all the reasons in the world to act so nonchalant and float through life with a superior aura of condescension and ennui, but we don’t know them. French Exit isn’t about how she got here, it’s about how she wants to go out.
I adore screenplays like this. It’s full of conversations you and nobody you know will ever have, but you wish you could play along. Supporting characters, only necessary for a scene or two, linger on far past their given utility. They are enjoyable side dishes taking up table space long after the waiter should have spirited them back to the kitchen during a previous course. Azazel Jacobs’s French Exit is absurd and it knows well how absurd it is. It dares you to point it out. Why would you? Why interrupt a ride this interesting?
I adore screenplays like this. It’s full of conversations you and nobody you know will ever have, but you wish you could play along. Supporting characters, only necessary for a scene or two, linger on far past their given utility. They are enjoyable side dishes taking up table space long after the waiter should have spirited them back to the kitchen during a previous course. Azazel Jacobs’s French Exit is absurd and it knows well how absurd it is. It dares you to point it out. Why would you? Why interrupt a ride this interesting?
When one says they are going to Paris tomorrow, you envision airports. Do people still take boats across the Atlantic? When is the last time you heard of a fortune teller giving someone bad news? That’s not how the game is supposed to go. All of this is way before we learn the cat contains the consciousness of the dead husband, Frank. The money is gone. Practical financial planning was too banal a task for Frances (Michelle Pfeiffer, Ant-Man and the Wasp). Thoughts of budgets and income vs. outflow would almost remove her head from the clouds for a moment. What does a woman who has never worked a day in her life and wanted for nothing do when the last of it is stacked up in Euros in a Parisian apartment closet? Well, they need a private investigator to track down the ship’s clairvoyant. They need her to find Frank…the cat. He ran away.
Observing all of this, usually stoic and numb, is Malcolm (Lucas Hedges, Boy Erased), the son who at one point is called out for exactly what he is - playing adult and hoping nobody notices how empty he is inside. Malcolm left his fiancé back in New York, but invites her and her new paramour to Paris where they both show up at the same time as everyone else. This would be too made-up for slapstick in other hands. In writer Patrick DeWitt’s hands, adapting the screenplay from his own novel, the plot keeps us guessing. There is a most unconventional mother-son relationship; often Malcolm is more parental than Frances. There is also a coming-of-age story, but it’s not Malcolm’s. His mother, however, appears to be morphing from a certain immaturity into another mental state.
Jacobs and DeWitt worked together on 2011’s Terri, another tale of outsiders, but on the opposite end of the social spectrum. DeWitt is a master at writing deadpan. Terri was the Sundance version of that while his script for 2018’s The Sisters Brothers had outlaws in a western, a different genre setting to be sure, deliver the same type of skewed banter. Pfeiffer’s Frances is akin to her far more stark turn in 2017’s Where is Kyra?, following a woman from an even lower caste than Terri, but experiencing a similar downward progression as Frances. French Exit emits such a unique, idiosyncratic charm because DeWitt’s script is borderline screwball. There is no way to guess which road he turns down next, but there is nowhere else you will want to be as he takes you there.
The Frances and Malcolm duo expands quickly in Paris to include the fortune teller, a widowed sycophant enthralled with Frances, the private investigator, an old friend, and Malcolm’s ex-fiancé and her new fiancé. These characters have no reason to exist together, but in its alternate universe sort of way, it works. Jacobs and cinematographer Tobias Datum opt to shoot this now crowded cast in a wide anamorphic frame ratio of 2.35:1. This style offers context to the shot; there’s the background and the sense of space each character inhabits at the moment. It’s more than possible that it’s Frances’s innate personal magnetism which gathers such an ad hoc, hodgepodge coterie of characters, but whatever brings them all together in this apartment out of time, notice there are no cell phones or computers, it is top-tier storytelling.
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