Exerting itself to squeeze some discomfiting laughter out of inertia and self-destruction, Azazel Jacobs’s FRENCH EXIT sustains a rather tepid temperature to keep our empathy at bay. Michelle Pfeiffer plays Frances Price, a widowed Manhattan socialite, relocates to Paris with her son Malcolm (Hedges), and a black cat (who later turns out to be the reincarnation of her late husband), when her fortune is summarily seized by the bank. Cashing out everything she owns into euros, Frances decides to end her own misery when the money is spent, and she is not stinting on the expenditure.

As a brittle, icy diva, Pfeiffer’s Frances is definitely not in the mood to meet anybody halfway, it is a role almost tailor made to Pfeiffer, when senescence casts a pall on her once youthful glamor, and every wrinkle on her face spits in the eye of ageism, you don’t expect her to mellow into a gracious lady. Warmth is never Pfeiffer’s strongest suit, so here, she goes for broke, throwing off any affectations (no cartoonish villainy, nor wretched politesse), her Frances is so single-mindedly propelled by her death wish, she becomes a totally strange, unfathomable creature whose conducts are beyond our ken. And yet, Pfeiffer’s standoffishness cannot dissimulate the void that benumbs Frances, her calibration and modulation is virtuosic.

That is why, hers is both a fascinating and frustrating role to watch for almost 2 hours, Patrick DeWitt’s script (it is based on his own novel) gets swamped in that mythified notion of one’s unknowability, his characters (apart from Frances) have no roots, they seem to be merely floating puppets, the detachment from reality should have been the forte of FRENCH EXIT, but the story’s black humor has no zinger, even the surreal parts of the séances and psychophony (in Tracy Letts’ rather animated voice, and it is not from the medium) are inert, like workaday altercations, they are distractingly mundane.

Cramming Malcolm’s growing pains, arrested development and immature relationship with Susan (Poots), and inter alia, a nosy fellow expatriate Mme. Reynard (a quirky but maddening Mahaffey) into the plot, by literally corralling everyone involved into the Price’s Parisian apartment, FRENCH EXIT futilely attempts to attain a far-out certification for its grim subject matter, only Frances and Malcolm’s final tête-à-tête makes some sense (Hedges looks a bit grotty, bland and enervated), elsewhere, the film is caught up in its own quicksand. It is sad to conform, a contrivance too disorganized and self-contained to connect with a wider audience, FRENCH EXIT isn’t a Pfeiffer vehicle which could get her the elusive Holy Grail, however inimitably delectable she is.

referential entries: Steven Soderbergh's LET THEM ALL TALK (2020, 6.6/10); Burr Steers' IGBY GOES DOWN (2002, 5.6/10).

Title: French Exit

Year: 2020

Genre: Comedy, Drama

Country: Canada, Ireland, UK

Language: English

Director: Azazel Jacobs

Screenwriter: Patrick DeWitt

based on his own novel

Music: Nicholas deWitt

Cinematography: Tobias Datum

Editing: Hilda Rasula

Cast:

Michelle Pfeiffer

Lucas Hedges

Valerie Mahaffey

Imogen Poots

Danielle Macdonald

Susan Coyne

Isaach De Bankolé

Daniel di Tomasso

Vlasta Vrana

Younes Bouab

Tracy Letts

Rating: 6.1/10