Not for everyone but Pfeiffer performance is award-worthy
A French exit, apparently, is when you discreetly leave a party early without saying goodbye to your host, something which, I’m ashamed to say, I’ve been instinctively doing for years. Now a film has taken the term for its title, and it’s important to remember its meaning as the increasingly strange goings-on unfold.
Because Frances Price – played with some flamboyance by Michelle Pfeiffer – is not the sort of woman for French exits. She’s a once-wealthy New York widow who has burnt through her late husband’s fortune at a rate that has left her worldweary, waspish and unrepentantly rude. If she leaves a party early, she’ll tell her hostess it’s because she’s bored.
But Frances’s spending has also left her broke and in no position to turn down her friend’s offer to stay in her apartment in Paris. So she gathers up her cat and adult son (Lucas Hedges) and heads to France.
‘What is the purpose of your visit?’ asks the passport official.
‘Chasing after youthful fantasies,’ she replies, deadpan, a line indicative of the wordy, theatrical tone adopted by director Azazel Jacobs that gets ever more surreal as it goes on. You need to keep an eye on that cat, for starters.
Despite distant echoes of the likes of Amélie and Midnight In Paris, this won’t be for everyone. But Pfeiffer deserves her Golden Globe nomination, there are some genuinely funny lines and Valerie Mahaffey is scene-stealingly good as the unwanted new best friend.