FRENCH EXIT

My only reason for watching this 2020 ‘dark comedy’ is that it stars Michelle Pfeiffer (and that it is set mainly in Paris).

She plays Frances, a Manhattan heiress who has been so irresponsible with her money that at the start of the film she is obliged to move into a (very spacious) apartment belonging to a friend who has no other use for it (the rich really do have it tough don’t they?).

Accompanying her is her son Malcolm.  It’s difficult to gauge his exact age but he is certainly old enough to hold down a job but the idea of his working in order to help their finances never appears to cross their minds.

Also with them is a cat who Frances believes possesses the spirit of her dead husband, Franklin.   We have to endure a couple of surreal scenes in which Franklin communicates with Frances via the voice of Tracy Letts.

Frances and Malcolm are befriended by a lonely and eccentric American expat who we know is eccentric because she keeps a dildo in her freezer.

I thought there was some potential in this triangle was but unfortunately the film rapidly becomes populated with a surfeit of characters, including Malcolm’s fiancée from America and her new boyfriend, a young woman who conducts the seances, the owner of the apartment, and a private detective hired to find the cat.

I couldn’t care less about any of these thinly drawn characters including Frances and Malcolm themselves who come across as cold and privileged specimens of the social elite.

It moves slowly, and the dialogue is nowhere as witty as Patrick deWitt, who adapted his own novel, would seem to believe.  

All in all, a disappointing waste of Pfeiffer's talent.