A Tragedy of Manners. This is how bestselling author Patrick DeWitt’s satirical novel “French Exit” was billed upon its publishing in 2018. That description is also spot-on for this elegant, droll, and heartbreaking screen adaption, directed with crafty command and confident style by Azazel Jacobs. Scripted by DeWitt himself with the authority of a wordsmith possessed by his own material, the fiendishly disarming “French Exit” widely and nonchalantly grins out its death-tinted tragedy throughout, but with a fake smile, a severe code of conduct, and not a hair out of place. It’s only after you spend enough time in the company of its handsomely dressed, oddball group of characters—led by a sexagenarian New York widow spending the final crumbs of her wealth in Paris—that you notice their bleeding bruises beneath this strangely captivating, clever little film’s perfect surface.
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That rich façade feels an awful lot like a Wes Anderson film: ornate, studious, and intentional in its details, though thankfully without Anderson’s whimsical, candy-colored trinkets. And what’s beyond it resembles something out of a Charlie Kaufman-esque text with its cavernous existential concerns and absurdist humor that involves a haunted, Tracy Letts-voiced t6 talking cat (yes, indeed!), but centered on the self-deprecating privileged as opposed to the middle-class. These features are loudly evident in the film’s brief flashback opening when we first meet the acutely mannered socialite Frances Price (a mesmerizingly catty Michelle Pfeiffer), who prances through a majestic private school’s hallways in her sateen dress, click-clacking heels, fur-trimmed coat, and heavy make-up, yanking out her young son Malcolm from his studies to oh-so-casually break him the news of his father Frank’s passing.
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In time, it’s understood this particular death had provided much gossip fodder to the Park Avenue elite; not because of Frank’s sudden heart attack, but because after discovering it, Frances left her husband’s corpse unattended for days, causing it to balloon to the much puzzlement of the paramedics and the scoop-hungry paparazzi. While her reaction is hardly defensible, it will come to make sense within the context of “French Exit” and this particular character whose every step registers as another dispassionate, so what?
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Years later, Frances and grown-up son, Malcolm (Lucas Hedges, with a depressive edge that the actor both owns and brilliantly shrugs off) are seen at the breakfast table in their handsome apartment. The tête-à-tête between the mother and son feels like something out of an amateur school play, where each sentence that escapes their mouth lands like a memorized and rehearsed phrase. However, this screeching superficial quality of their line delivery should not be seen as a bug of the film. As two dissatisfied, abandoned people, this is their usual mode. They’ve learned to bury their emotions so deeply within themselves, they’ve forgotten feelings exist and are okay to have. Even when Frances inquires about her son’s troubled relationship with his girlfriend Susan (Imogen Poots), she can’t help but immerse herself in sarcasm. “Oh, to be young-ish and in love-ish,” she longs, so un-motherly, so without a trace of sincere longing.
Frances’ detachment extends into the afternoon when the family accountant informs that her cash reserve is all gone. Upset that she didn’t die before the money ran out as she had hoped decades ago, the insolvent mother liquidates all her remaining valuables and flees to her friend Joan’s (Susan Coyne) Paris apartment with Malcolm, who bids a slapdash farewell to his girlfriend. An extravagant cruise-ship journey later, there they are, in Paris, with nothing to do but burn through wads of cash during a period that Frances thinks of as her third act in life.
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Enter the clairvoyant, death-sniffing Madeleine (Danielle Macdonald, aptly witchy), the incurably lonely ex-pat widow Mme. Reynard (a sweet yet dangerously controlled Valerie Mahaffey), the esoteric private investigator Julius (Isaach De Bankolé), joined eventually by Joan, Susan, and her new beau Tom (Daniel di Tomasso). Never mind how these unlikely clan of eccentric loners eventually shack up together in the lovely Parisian pied-à-terre and offhandedly conjure up the ghost of the deceased Price. But instead, keep a close ear to their musings on life and death, love and sacrifice, originality, and triteness over nights of bottomless martinis. And succumb to this clan’s luscious disharmony—it’s as if they are the ensemble of a 21st century “You Can’t Take It With You,” but with silent acrimony and individuality, and not generosity and accord, as their main currency.
Gracefully filmed through a lens that sees pain and loneliness in every frame and negative space, even during laugh-out-funny moments, “French Exit” is perhaps a touch monotonous, a touch amiably tidy in its mother-son conclusion, a bit too prescriptively melancholic for an otherwise non-didactic film with its piano-heavy score. But these minor gaffes don’t diminish what’s ultimately a perfect marriage of a writer and director as two savvy genre-benders. Like he did to the Western genre with his book “The Sisters Brothers,” DeWitt soundly infuses this domestic drama with a plausible dose of idiosyncratic witticism that doesn’t feel overdone. Meanwhile, as he did with his unusually grown-up romantic comedy “The Lovers,” Jacobs maturely summons a world of bitter and maybe even unlikeable characters, and makes one desperately fall for them.
Through her dagger-like stares, suggestive lip pursing, and flaming cinnamon hair that rivals the color of Parisian autumn leaves, much of the triumph also belongs to no other than Pfeiffer here, who sets “French Exit” ablaze throughout. In certain scenes, her coldness insinuates a murderous, almost Patrick Bateman-esque indifference. In others, she chooses to let the viewer peek into Frances’ vulnerabilities, but only briefly. In all of them, she expertly masticates and spits out her lines with musical precision, as if Frances is out there to avenge a life for which she has no f*cks left to give. Like “French Exit” itself, Pfeiffer is a vision: chilly and distant at first, but deeply, even painfully relatable in the aftermath to anyone preoccupied with a future of unknowns, often asking themselves, “now what?” [B+]
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