French Exit Parent Guide

“My plan was to die before the money ran out. But I kept not dying.” With her “plan” in tatters, New York socialite Frances Price is left with huge debts and minimal assets. Accepting a friend’s offer of a vacant Paris apartment, Frances takes her adult son, her cat, and a stash of euros and sails for France.

French Exit is a strange film; part drama, part very dark comedy. At its heart is Frances, portrayed with edgy brilliance by Michelle Pfeiffer. Frances is an intriguing character, erratic, destructive, and painfully vulnerable. Oddly enough, she puts me in mind of Disney’s Cruella de Vil: the two women share a reckless narcissism and a brittle flamboyance Despite Frances’ continual disregard of others, there’s a certain fascination in wondering what outrageous thing she’s going to say next or what social norms she’s going to break. I must admit to laughing out loud at her distinctive manner of obtaining prompt service from a Parisian waiter, a method that is not practicable for the more conventional among us.

With such a flamboyant character at the heart of the story, it’s difficult for other characters to compete for our attention. Lucas Hedges, playing her son Malcolm, doesn’t try, settling comfortably into the role of junior sidekick. She treats him with sardonic, detached affection; he responds with fascinated, bemused loyalty. Throw in a faithful old friend from New York (Susan Coyne), a needy new friend in Paris (Valerie Mahaffey), a fortune telling medium (Danielle Macdonald), and a private investigator (Isaach De Bankolé) and the film has plenty of oddball characters to flesh out the story without taking Frances’s place in the sun.

The movie’s talented cast is sabotaged by the mannered style imposed by the script and director Azazel Jacobs. It’s a tribute to their ability that pretentious lines of unrealistic dialogue actually work. (Not all the time, but often enough to keep the film afloat.) What none of the actors can save, however, is a downright weird subplot involving Frances’s cat. I’m not going to give any spoilers, but this storyline moves well past quirky and into ridiculous.

Intensifying these problems are serious content concerns. There are almost non-stop scenes of smoking and alcohol consumption, including some where main characters become intoxicated. The film’s profanity, though lacking the ubiquity of many Restricted films, still features a dozen sexual expletives. The biggest issues, though, revolve around sex and violence. The potential of suicide runs through the movie, sometimes in an undercurrent, sometimes explicitly. And although there’s no nudity or sex on screen, there is a bizarre moment involving a frozen sex toy in a freezer. Religious viewers may also object to séances which involving communicating with dead (profanity-using) relatives.

Clearly, French Exit earns its Restricted rating and is not suitable for teens. Given its oddly artificial script and mannered style, it’s not going to appeal to a mass audience either. Adult fans of Michelle Pfeiffer or dark comedies may get their money’s worth, but for everyone else, c’est trop bizarre.