“French Exit”, Azazel Jacobs’ new film takes place in a world removed from our own. Yes, it takes place in something resembling contemporary New York and Paris, and the characters speak in English and look like people we are familiar with. But, an important part of the fabric of its existence depends on something existing on the peripheries of normality and reality. A world, just slightly askance.
The opening moment of “French Exit,” which is an adaptation of Patrick deWitt’s novel, is a brief two-minute prologue. In it, a woman – clearly rich, and clearly unconventional – arrives in the middle of the day to remove her son from school. The headmaster is against it. The woman, shepherding her pre-teen son out of the building, does not care. The son is concerned about the lack of clothes, and his other things. “We’ll buy new ones,” she insists. And so, they leave. Later in the film the scene appears in full, contextualising the seemingly spontaneous escape and the countenance of the players. But it sets up two things that are critical to the film that will follow: The obedience of Malcolm (Eddie Holland), the son, to his mother, Frances (Michelle Pfeiffer), and her carelessness about money and the world around her.
If, “French Exit” has any straightforward crises to resolve, it is that both characters must come to a point where they overcome these issues. And, in their way, Malcolm and Frances do work at grappling with these issues over the course of the film. But, “French Exit” is not straightforward. And as familiar as Malcolm and Frances might be, they are not quite like people we know. It’s important that they not be, and that the world they inhabit feels ever so slightly off-kilter.
The proper story begins, some years later, in something like the present. Frances and Malcolm (now, an adult, played by Lucas Hedges) live in a grand house in New York but the money is dwindling. So much so that the new year, less than a month away, will see all their resources repossessed and their income stream – all inherited from Frances’ dead husband – will be cut off. The only valid solution is for Frances to, not quite legally, sell everything off and take the money and escape to Paris. Malcolm, despite his engagement, accompanies her on this impromptu exit to Europe, along with their cat – a physical vessel for the soul of Frances’ dead husband.
The cat-as-father aspect of “French Exit” is inarguably the most explicit evidence to argue for the oddity of “French Exit”, but it’s important that the film, like the novel, delays this information for some time. For “French Exit” to work, this fact must be a mere casual bit of information in a world that already seems off. deWitt, adapting his own novel for the screen, keeps the shape of the original text and cedes much control and trust to Jacobs’ direction, which produces a critical mood of slippery strangeness on-screen.
In some ways, the arch tweeness of “French Exit” seems out of place for now, too affected to exist in the here-and-now. An ambivalent engagement with an heiress hanging on to her finances in a 2021 that has only revealed the perversions and corruption of the very rich feels at best tone-deaf, at worse exhausting. But part of the charm of “French Exit” is that it does not quite fit. This is not a world recognisably like ours.
deWitt’s novel is riffing on a particular kind of absurdist-lite comedy of manners that is inherently literary in the way it seems to be more novel and novelistic than real or realistic. But the external trappings of the story are only performing a kind of sleight-of-hand for the emotions lurking beneath that counter than distancing artifice for something more complicated. This is not a world like ours but beyond the specifics of the plot and the content of these odd people “French Exit” is exactly of this time. It’s suffused with an ambivalent sadness that dances into comedic that is not as much funny as it is sadly wan.
Pfeiffer and Hedges are excellent at inhabiting the space of that ambivalence. For Pfeiffer, much of it is in her intonation. Pfeiffer, notably excellent at inflecting her voice to arch effect, performs Frances as a woman preternaturally aware of her ludicrousness but also unable to resist it. Her affectations are maddening, but too knowingly ridiculously in their self-awareness; too silly for tragedy, but too deliberate to be silly. It sets Hedges up as a perfect dramatic foil for her. If Pfeiffer is the best offence, then he is the best defence. Hedges has always been good, but here – equipped with a deadpan ability to react to the chaos around him – he has never been better, and as the ambivalent comedy gives way something less ambivalent and less funny, they both get even better.
In France, the pair finds comfort and distraction. First, a medium enters the picture to act as an intermediary between the world of the film and the magical cat. Then, another American expatriate, (a note-perfect Valerie Mahaffey) offers something like friendship for Frances. They are joined by Malcolm’s jilted fiancée, her new-boyfriend, an amiable detective and a childhood friend of Frances. Important conversations between “dead” dad, living son and in-between mother become the focal point of the story and suddenly the incongruous patterns of “French Exit” reveal themselves slowly, but surely, as an exploration of grief and loss of control.
Can sadness be comedic? Each moment of “French Exit” seems suffused with it. From the melancholy timbre of Nick deWitt’s score, which interjects as a release from tension but also to extend our uncertainty, to the casual way that Tobias Datum’s camera traipses through the streets and hallways, considering and questioning the artificial surroundings of these people and their artificial lives. The undertones of sadness only serve to augment the wry whimsy, but the whimsy is never working to release us from the tensions of grief. When we get the full context of the opening scene at the end, it is as if a puzzle has been worked out but still without a solution. “French Exit” depends on its slipperiness, its abruptness and its unwillingness to let us figure out exactly what it is. But, by the end, it’s hard not to be moved by its sincerity. Even in a world that seems completely removed from ours, the trueness of the emotions beneath it feels real enough.
“French Exit” is now available for streaming and purchase on GooglePlay, iTunes, and YouTube.
