FRENCH GIRL - Mark Reviews Movies

French Girl, Republic Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 14, 2024

At a certain age, being a man who's defined by how insecure he is about and around women and his relationships with them is more than pathetic. It's just downright embarrassing. That's certainly the case with the lead character of French Girl, a pitiful excuse for a comedy that's made even worse by the off-putting character around whom it revolves.

He's Gordon (Zach Braff), a middle school English teacher in New York City who's a hit with his students because he makes learning about Shakespeare fun. More importantly, though, Gordon is dating Sophie (Evelyne Brochu), a French-Canadian chef who also loves her job but wants more. She gets an opportunity, and Gordon becomes an unconfident fool for all sorts of reasons as a result.

Braff has played roles like this—the inherently awkward and uncertain guy who's in love with a woman he believes to be clearly out of his league—in the past and had differing degrees of success in bringing some charm to those characters. It's a fact of life that time comes for us all. We hopefully stop being the young fool of our 20s and have a harder time making excuses for any remnants of those traits in our 30s.

Even the most genetically gifted or skin-care-conscious actors reach a point in their lives at which it's less likely to play younger than their age. Braff is in his late 40s now, and he looks it in this movie. That's fine in general, but to the point of this particular endeavor, co-writers/directors James A. Woods and Nicolas Wright have cast him a role that feels more suited to the emotional folly of someone in his 20s or the unfortunate remnants of those traits that might still exist for a guy in his 30s.

Watching Braff's Gordon become so insecure, jealous, and willing to engage in destructive behavior over the fact that his girlfriend might get a new job working for her ex isn't cute or funny. No matter how much the filmmakers try to play it that way—and, oh, do they ever with the schtick and labored gags—throughout the movie, Gordon comes across as sad and miserable in a way that just hits one's soul. This guy has had more than two decades of adult life to figure out this kind of shit, but here he is, whining and being passive-aggressive and being chased by a swan and desecrating a corpse in order to try to emotionally manipulate a kind, smart, and successful woman into staying with him.

At various points, we're rooting for the swan, the corpse (Yes, that scene will be explained in more detail later, but isn't the suggestion unsettling enough?), the ex, and especially Sophie to just put this guy out of his self-created misery. Instead, Gordon and his quest to propose to Sophie before she's offered a new job, presumably so she either won't take it or won't think of dumping him on account of her newfound success (Neither seems honest, respectful, or sympathetic, so maybe it's better the notion is kept as broad as possible), continue.

The multi-stage job interview is taking place in Sophie's hometown of Quebec City, where she and Gordon will stay on her family's farm. Gordon doesn't fit in with her relatives, who see him as a spoiled, big-city American who doesn't deserve the grounded and beautiful Sophie.

A smarter, funnier movie might have acknowledged that the family is absolutely right on all counts, but this one has Gordon regularly being pursued by a giant swan, accidentally elbowing Sophie's father (played by Luc Picard) in the face at an MMA fight, and trying to convince Sophie's dementia-riddled grandmother (played by Muriel Dutil) to take off the engagement ring she took from his bag. That last part eventually leads to him sneaking into the poor old woman's bedroom at night, instead of confiding in anyone about what has happened like a rational adult, and, since granny isn't long for the world, trying to yank the band from a lifeless finger. It gets worse from there.

All of this nonsense stems from Gordon's jealousy of Ruby (Vanessa Hudgens), the owner of the new restaurant and Sophie's ex-girlfriend. The whole of the "problem" could be resolved with a single conversation about how the couple feels about each other and how Sophie feels about Ruby, but that would require the two lead characters of French Girl to be adults. They both are, technically, but in attempting to convince us that Gordon is the put-upon romantic hero of this story and not some unsympathetic loser, the movie treats us like children.

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