A FEW AMERICANS IN PARIS

Opening today in theaters:

French Exit--Frances, an elegant, widowed Manhattanite played by Michelle Pfeiffer, finds herself broke at around 60. She’s been warned for years about the impending collapse, but she blithely assumed she’d expire before her finances did.

A kind friend offers her the use of an apartment in Paris, so Frances liquidates her art, books and other valuables. She, her twentysomething son (Lucas Hedges), and her rather marvelous black cat Small Frank make the crossing to the City of Light. Her plan is to exhaust what’s left of her money, then end her life.

Adapted by Patrick deWitt from his own novel and directed by Azazel Jacobs, this wistful comedy of the unconscionably upper class is carried by Pfeiffer’s brittle, enchanting performance, and by the dialogue, as polished and carefully curated as the décor in the socialite homes we see. Pfeiffer gives her lines an edge of polite impatience behind the dizziness, as if Frances can’t believe that she’s expected to deal with these irksome details of reality. But she’s too essentially good-natured to make a fuss about it.

In 2017 Jacobs wrote and directed The Lovers, a terrific marital comedy that I thought was one of the more original films of its kind in years; I put on my list of the best of the ‘teens. His directorial touch here is light and smooth as well. He gets delightful performances not just from Pfeiffer but from Hedges as the helplessly enthralled son, Valerie Mahaffey as an eccentric Paris widow who insinuates herself into the drama, and Danielle Macdonald as a sullen psychic. Jacobs even brings off a mild supernatural element, connected to Small Frank the cat, with amusing urbanity.

But there was something about the skewed fatalism by which Frances lives, and that I seemed expected to admire, that I couldn’t help but find off-putting from my view in the cheap seats. French Exit is a comedy, and at times it’s laugh out loud funny. But there’s also an aching sadness to it, and a sense of wounded entitlement that’s almost infuriating.

VARIETY IS THE SPOUSE

Opening in the Valley this weekend:

The Lovers—The title characters are Mary (Debra Winger) and Michael (Tracy Letts), California cubicle rats long married to, and out of love with, each other. Both are in serious extramarital relationships, and have been for a while. They still share a bed and have dinner together, and unquestioningly accept each others’ transparent lies and cover stories about why they’re home late from work—at the gym, having drinks with a friend, etc—in civil, unspoken détente.

Their high-maintenance lovers—a ballet teacher (Melora Walters) for Michael, and a brooding writer (Aiden Guillen) for Mary—are impatient for them to divorce, however. When their anxiety is compounded by an impending visit from their disapproving college-age son (Tyler Ross) and his new girlfriend (Jessica Sula), the pressure gets so strong that Mary and Michael suddenly find each other the least demanding people in their lives. One morning before work they impulsively have sex, and before long they’re having a furtive, surreptitious affair, with each other.

Azazel Jacobs wrote and directed this delightful, low-key comedy-drama, a take on adultery and fidelity I hadn’t seen before. It’s full of passages of high comedy, like Michael’s indirect yet steely-voiced verbal seduction of his wife over the phone while he’s out on a date with the ballet teacher, or Mary’s struggle, distracted by thoughts of sex with her husband, to listen while the cool writer reads to her from his work.

But beyond the ingenuity of the situation, I loved the depiction of how these people live. Movies about adultery are often set among people who have all day to devote to it, the economically comfortable idle cheaters. The Lovers shows the rushed, unsatisfactory quality of adulterous encounters. It’s full of splendid details, like the cigarette burns on the tree outside Mary’s office building, where the writer waits to meet her, or the knowing glances of Mary’s and Michael’s coworkers as they scurry into work late.

This atmosphere, so rarely seen in movies that it seems almost exotic, extends to the leads. Winger and Letts look their age here, and it makes them more, not less, intensely attractive—it’s entirely believable that their younger, superficially more glamorous lovers would be the needy pursuers in the relationships. But we also see that this magnetism doesn’t make life easier for them. They’re constantly scrambling around, making excuses and apologizing, constantly hounded by the familiar middle-aged idea, not unfounded, that they’re letting everybody down.

It’s only now and then any more that I feel, watching a movie, that I have no idea how the story will turn out, and that I deeply care. The Lovers gave me that unaccustomed feeling, and its resolution seemed to me perfectly convincing and apt. It may be my favorite film so far this year.