Mark Reviews Movies: FRENCH EXIT

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 11, 2021

French Exit replaces oddity for characterization and quirk for story. It starts as a straightforward tale, about the nearly co-dependent relationship between a wealthy woman and her adult son, but grows stranger and stranger, becoming more and more off-putting in the process. By the end, we're supposed to feel a sense of melancholy and mourning for these characters, as well as the relationships they have, but it's mostly a relief to be out of their unwelcome company.

The straightforward part of the setup revolves around Frances Price (Michelle Pfeiffer, who does as well as she can, engendering this character with a sense of cold elegance) and her son Malcolm (Lucas Hedges). When the son was a boy in boarding school, Frances arrived suddenly and without warning to return him to a home he apparently knew only barely. She married into wealth, and her husband has since died under what was rumored to be mysterious circumstances—although what happened to him after death, as it turns out, is even more puzzling.

We'll allude to that, like Patrick DeWitt's screenplay (based on his novel), eventually. Meanwhile, in the present day, Frances' fortunes are about to expire. Her accountant makes a suggestion: Sell everything she owns, while she still owns it, and use the money to live out her remaining years.

Frances decides to move to Paris, since her best friend Joan (Susan Coyne) offers her apartment there. Malcolm is going to come, too, even though he's engaged to Susan (Imogen Poots). He brings flowers to their break-up, which she, rightly, finds more than a bit odd and not exactly in the realm of regular behavior in such matters.

None of these characters—or, indeed, most of the characters who are introduced or arrive in Paris as Frances' later-life adventures proceed—could be described as exhibiting regular behavior or even existing in a way that could be described as normal. That's the joke of Azazel Jacobs' movie, which adds complication after complication and idiosyncrasy after idiosyncrasy, until the story becomes more about how strange matters can be developed than anything else. It's the only joke of the movie, and as becomes apparent quite quickly, the joke is the only thing about which the movie particularly cares.

DeWitt does seem to be going for something deeper here, beyond and within the superficial trappings of these characters. If that is the case, Jacobs either misses that point or drowns it with all of the eccentrics within and eccentricities of this story.

There are a few scenes that could be described as tender or even compassionate, such as Frances' encounters with two displaced people (She finds them honest and noble, although, from the way the character is written and portrayed in every other scene, there's more than a sense of condescension to these interactions, too). In Paris, mother and son become friends with Mme. Reynard (Valerie Mahaffey), a lonely widow who knew of Frances' exploits, having grown up in New York. She just a wants a friend, and after being scolded by Malcolm for her transparent mocking of the sad woman, Reynard gets two—although Malcolm isn't above laughing at her for keeping a sex toy, for some unknowable reason, in the freezer.

Such scenes and moments, though, are about the end of anything even remotely identifiable as humane or even human. The plot, such as it is, eventually involves Frances' cat, which she takes with her to Paris via a trans-Atlantic cruise, where Malcolm meets and has a one-night-stand with Madeleine (Danielle Macdonald), a fortune teller who recognizes there's something different about the cat.

The cat escapes the apartment, so Frances hires a private investigator (played by Isaach De Bankolé) to find Madeleine, whom she believes will, in turn, find the cat. Frances is also, as she discloses in a postcard to Joan, planning to commit suicide as soon as the money is gone. The apartment becomes packed with new friends, old ones, acquaintances, and Malcolm's ex-fiancée and her new beau (played by Daniel di Tomasso), who's meant to be a bore but comes to be the sole voice of sanity as he realizes how messed up all these people are. There are a couple of séances to communicate with the cat, which is no ordinary feline, and they're played with baffling sincerity.

All of this—from the mostly irritating characters, to the bizarre turns of the story, to Jacobs' stone-faced tone—puts up a taller and taller wall between this story and our ability to connect with it on any level. French Exit primarily seems set on proving on how weird it can be, and while it certainly accomplishes that, it accomplishes almost nothing else.

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