A screen legend makes a glorious exit
FRENCH EXIT I Michelle Pfeiffer escapes to Paris in a onepercenter satire.
There’s a scene in French Exit, director Azazel Jacobs’ adaptation of Patrick deWitt’s novel, that the film hinges on. In it, Michelle Pfeiffer’s disgraced socialite Frances Price holds a séance with a motley crew of friends and family she’s assembled in her temporary Paris apartment. Precisely why, and what happens, deserves to be discovered on screen. All you need to know is that upon hitting the scene in the book, Jacobs had one thought: “Uh-oh, this is going to be really, really, really hard!”
In comparison to the film’s gleefully WTF centrepiece, making the rest of French Exit proved surprisingly painless for Jacobs. The director, who had worked with deWitt before, on 2011’s Terri, knew he wanted to put French Exit on screen immediately after reading his friend’s unfinished manuscript. “We talked about the translation to the screen as he was finishing the book,” recalls Jacobs, who collaborated on the screenplay with deWitt. “We just dove into it without anybody else involved.”
Both the novel and the film are the story of Frances and her buttoned-up son Malcolm (Lucas Hedges). Frances is the kind of Manhattan elite who boasts of never having worked a day in
her life, but some years after the death of her husband, Frances’ fortune has dried up. After liquidating her home and everything in it, Frances takes her son, her cat Little Frank, and the remaining money to Paris, where she plans to live the lavish life she always has, and end it all once the last cent is gone.
It may sound like an easily dismissable story about onepercenter problems at a time of rampant economic inequality, but Jacobs took something else from deWitt’s richly realised characters. “I completely understand that as a reaction,” the director admits. “But I read this book and thought, ‘OK, this person has nothing to do with my own experience, and yet I feel very connected to her.’” In particular, Jacobs responded to the idea of, “What are we, if we no longer have the thing that represents us and makes us feel whole, in the way Frances does about money?”
Pfeiffer had the same question (and one other: “About this cat, what’s the plan?”) Jacobs describes the actress as his “moonshot” choice for the role, and the results speak for themselves, with Pfeiffer receiving some of the best notices of her career for her brittle turn as Frances. “I had an inclination that this is an actor who has nothing to prove, and is still hungry,” Jacobs says. “That’s what I was really excited for: someone who still wants to put that work in.” The hard work has paid off. JF
ETA | 26 MARCH / FRENCH EXIT OPENS NEXT MONTH.