The Doctor’s Diagnosis: C-
I don’t know what the fuck this movie is or who it was made for. Hipsters, maybe, I don’t know. On the surface, French Exit seems like another entry in one of my least favorite genres: award-grabbing dramas with little plot about characters that amount to nothing but an odd collection of quirks (see Kajillionaire for a recent example). However, I’m not even sure that this is supposed to take place in reality. While the trailers and reviews present this almost universally as a serious drama, there is so much weird nonsense in French Exit that I sometimes wondered if I was watching the wrong movie. It’s like a Wes Anderson movie that isn’t in on its own jokes. I don’t like this movie, but I also don’t know what to make of it.
Michelle Pheiffer stars as a New York socialite that discovers that all of her money, which was left by her dead husband, has run out. Apparently being broke for rich people means that you go to Paris to live in your rich friend’s extra apartment (rent-free, of course) until your last few hundred grand runs out, at which point you plan to kill yourself. So she moves to Paris with her equally useless son and, um, mild hijinks ensue? I guess?
The characters in this movie are all fucking awful people and the script doesn’t seem to know what sort of response the audience is supposed to have toward them. If I’m supposed to relate to them or sympathize with them, then holy shit did this film miss the mark. I know some people that are pretty rich, but I don’t know anyone that’s wealthy. I mean old-money, never had a job, have both a parlor and sitting room to escape the pressure of drinking martinis in the living room, motherfucking wealthy. I imagine that being wealthy would distort your concept of reality, but wealthy people, according to this film, are just douchebags that sit around making passive-aggressive comments all day. There is not a redeeming quality to either Pheiffer or her son; every wry comment just made me want to punch them in the face. Even in the face of relative poverty, not once is there a fleeting mention of the possibility of doing something as pedestrian as getting a fucking job. I don’t like these people and I don’t give a shit about them, but the film acts as if I should. I have no idea why.
Aside from being obnoxious dickbags, nobody in this film (even the non-wealthy characters) behave in a way to could be considered remotely human. For example, whenever a character shows up at the Paris apartment, they just live there now. This includes a psychic and a private investigator. They serve their purpose in the plot and literally just never leave; they now live and sleep in the apartment. This is never treated as a joke or even referenced. The son’s ex-fiancé and her new fiancé also show up; not sure why and I’m pretty sure that humans don’t behave that way, but they also just live there now. This is also a film, like Kajillionaire or a Wes Anderson movie, where everybody is quirky and the film introduces these quirks as if they are ends unto themselves. For example, the film makes a point of telling us that a character keeps a dildo in her freezer. It’s never explained and never mentioned again, but the film really wants you to know it. That’s a microcosm of this movie: a series of non-sequiturs that the film mistakes as cleverness.
What really deserves special mention, though, is something that’s oddly missing from everything that I’ve read about this movie. French Exit is largely about a possessed cat and not enough people are talking about that. You see, the ghost of Pheiffer’s husband went into a cat when he died. I don’t mean that in a symbolic or allegorical sense. I mean that her husband is now a fucking cat. This is the only supernatural element of the film and nobody acknowledges it as strange. The cat runs away and they hold seances to speak with the ghost in the body of the cat, which are meant to be serious scenes of the son telling the father that he always felt neglected. Again, he’s TALKING TO A FUCKING CAT. Why is this in the goddamn movie? Why doesn’t anyone think its weird? I mean, it at least gave me something to talk about, but what the fuck is this movie?
Michelle Pheiffer is receiving a lot of acclaim for her performance and I can’t argue with that. She is excellent and brings some texture to an abysmal character, but even she can’t salvage awful, stilted dialogue and a script that was written by somebody that isn’t as smart as they think they are. Part dry drama and part unintentional comedy, French Exit is intellectual masturbation for the film festival circuit that I’ve elevated an entire letter grade solely for the haunted cat.
Image By: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/7c/French_Exit_poster.jpeg
