French Exit – first-look review

Michelle Pfeif­fer moves through Azazel Jacobs’ French Exit like a snow leop­ard, prowl­ing and snarling and glar­ing while inclement con­di­tions rage all around her. She plays Frances Price, a recent wid­ow left with a sum of mon­ey far too finite to sus­tain the uptown Man­hat­tan lifestyle to which she’s grown accustomed.

After a friend offers to put her up in a Parisian flat sit­ting unused – a wind­fall of priv­i­lege straight out of Nora Ephron, and an ear­ly hint to the tony plea­sures in store – she col­lects her son Mal­colm (Lucas Hedges) and sets a course for the Old Con­ti­nent, where she can implode with flair.

She lives in a mag­nif­i­cent down­ward spi­ral dur­ing her time in the city of lights, burn­ing through her stacked reserves of cash along with the good­will of the peo­ple sur­round­ing her. It’s hard to know whether she’s always been the sort of per­son who starts a small, con­trolled fire to get the atten­tion of a wait­er ignor­ing her, or if the death of her hus­band (Tra­cy Letts) made her a cat­ti­er and more vin­dic­tive ver­sion of herself.

Either way, she’s a spec­i­men to behold as treats every­one in sight with a deli­cious con­tempt, none more so than the lone­ly neigh­bour (Valerie Mahaf­fey) so starved for human con­tact that she befriends the vis­i­bly not-into-it Frances. Pfeif­fer makes for a divert­ing grand dame, to the point that we can see why some­one would want to share her pres­ence even as she treats them like merde.

Their odd bond takes up lim­it­ed space in a plot sur­pris­ing­ly crowd­ed in spite of the low-key vibe Jacobs cul­ti­vates. Mal­colm has a fiancée back in the States (Imo­gen Poots), who doesn’t take her dead­beat boyfriend’s sud­den dis­ap­pear­ance all that well.

A pri­vate inves­ti­ga­tor (Isaach De Bankolé) lands on the Price bankroll, assigned to find the sar­don­ic for­tune teller (Danielle Mac­don­ald) that Mal­colm ran into on the boat over. She’s the only one capa­ble of com­muning with Small Frank, the lit­tle black cat now act­ing as a con­tain­er for the soul of Frances’ late spouse. The leisure­ly sort of bus­tle gives the impres­sion of a rather dour farce, in par­tic­u­lar when every­one con­venes for argu­ments and par­ty games á la Mis­tress Amer­i­ca.

The busi­ness with the cute kit­ty speak­ing in the sonorous tones of Tra­cy Letts is of a piece with a more gen­er­al atmos­phere of eccen­tric­i­ty, import­ed as direct­ly as pos­si­ble from Patrick DeWitt’s source nov­el. This is one of those movies that announces its lit­er­ary ori­gins by fill­ing the char­ac­ters’ mouths with prose air­lift­ed right from the author’s pen, dia­logue that in this instance must play much bet­ter on the page than aloud.

Every third attempt at some flour­ish­ing wit­ti­cism or poet­ic pro­fun­di­ty lands with a thunk, though that does leave a good­ly pro­por­tion of hits to miss­es. (Upon learn­ing that his para­mour has got­ten engaged to anoth­er man, Mal­colm dead­pans, ​“You can’t get engaged again. That’s polygamy. That’s ille­gal. You’ll go to jail.”)

The char­ac­ters’ speech, an alien’s best attempt to approx­i­mate chat­ter in the Eng­lish lan­guage, stands out as the most dis­tinc­tive ele­ment of what would oth­er­wise be a show­case for the estimable tal­ents of Michelle Pfeif­fer. She sells the grav­i­ty of her grief and self-destruc­tion, even as it’s sit­u­at­ed in a work intent on evok­ing the feath­er-light­ness of recent Woody Allen in its music, cin­e­matog­ra­phy and gen­er­al milieu.

The ​“mis­be­hav­iour of the rich and famous” angle made the film a per­fect selec­tion to close out the New York Film Fes­ti­val, but it sells Pfeif­fer short. Just as Frances seems strand­ed in a high-class world push­ing her out like a splin­ter, her bravu­ra per­for­mance gets lost in Jacobs’ unmem­o­rable direction.