After Frances’s long-suffering lawyer breaks the news of her impending destitution (his warnings having gone unheeded in the decade since her husband died), Frances takes his advice and sells everything she owns – furniture, clothes and all. She converts the money from the sale into euros and accepts her best friend Joan’s (Susan Coyne) offer to take up residence in her empty apartment in Paris. Tail between her legs, Frances boards a cruise ship with her live-in adult son Malcolm (Lucas Hedges) and their black cat Small Frank, embarking on … what exactly? A self-imposed exile? A second act? A coda? Retirement? These are all words suggested to describe Frances’s flight from the Upper West Side, but none are exactly accurate. She herself points out that you can’t retire if you’ve never done a day’s work in your life. Once they arrive in Paris, Frances and Malcolm continue their odd, disjointed cohabitation, watching their pile of euros dwindle even as they continue to spend lavishly and recklessly. Stripped of their status and wealth, they sneer at their immaculate apartment and glower at the stunning autumnal streets, exuding a uniquely bourgeois ennui that feels rather tone deaf in 2021.

Soon enough, Frances and Malcolm attract an ensemble cast of acquaintances and hangers-on. There is Mme Reynard (Valerie Mahaffey), a similarly widowed ex-New Yorker who hero-worships Frances. There’s Susan (Imogen Poots), Malcolm’s long-suffering fiancée, and Tom (Daniel di Tomasso), her brutish college fiancé from before Malcolm. Then there’s Julius (Isaach de Bankolé), the Parisian private investigator whom Frances hires to find Madeleine (Danielle Macdonald, fantastic in Patti Cake$ and Skin, among others), a clairvoyant from their cruise ship who shares a special connection with Small Frank. By the third act, all these characters appear to have taken up full-time residence in Joan’s small apartment, sleeping in chairs and fold-out sofas, transforming Frances’ prior isolation into something of an ensemble farce – albeit one that never quite knows what to do with all its moving parts and colourful ingredients. There are séances, fiery high jinks in cafés, arm wrestles, and mercy dashes in the wake of wayward suicide notes. At times, French Exit seems to aspire to the absurdist antics of Buñuel, Ionesco, or Stoppard, tales often taking place in the halls of power or chambers of the wealthy in which every character – be they socialite, clairvoyant, or private detective – has a knack for off-the-cuff philosophising. But French Exit’s parade of characters spouting verbose non sequiturs falls short of true absurdity, let alone profundity.

It is just one of many hats the film tries on and finds ill-fitting. It isn’t quite fantastical enough to be truly surreal, but it is too kooky to pass as meaningful character drama. It’s also far too languid to function as a screwball comedy; dead air fills many of the characters’ stilted exchanges, and aside from a few lively moments (mostly courtesy of Mahaffey, the only performer who seems to have given herself permission to really let go and raise a few laughs), the comic beats don’t land. And for all its attempts at macabre humour, and Frances’s obsession with death, the film isn’t focused or empathetic enough to offer any considered meditation on one’s end of life or legacy.

A still from French Exit (Sony Pictures Classics)

Stylistically, French Exit feels frustratingly unambitious. The City of Light is framed in a paint-by-numbers way, and Nicholas deWitt’s score amounts to a tinkering piano that chimes in to crank up the pathos when required. The editing does little to assist with comic timing, and the performances range from excellent (Pfeiffer) to baffling (Hedges and Poots), with an in-house dialogue delivery style that feels stunted, mechanical, and drained of sensation; you’d be better off reading deWitt’s words on the page and imagining it all for yourself.

The exception to this is Pfeiffer, who routinely out-performs the material she’s been given. The uncanny depth of her gaze and her regal facial features become essential tools for a character who relates to the world exclusively by toying with it – sometimes flirtatiously, sometimes cruelly, occasionally violently. Her performance hints at deep sorrow that the film prevents her from truly exploring, opting instead for a steady stream of droll witticisms. Frances’s defining characteristic is her well-honed ‘absolute indifference’ – but this is an attribute French Exit adopts for itself, to the film’s and its characters’ detriment.

Hedges’s Malcolm is one of the strangest creations of the whole movie. After a string of star-making roles in Manchester by the Sea, Mid90s, and Lady Bird, here the young actor trades his buzzcut and teen angst for long locks and upper-class malaise. He communicates desire but speaks like an automaton, drinks like a fish but never gets drunk, sitting placidly in an assortment of armchairs and watching the world unfold before him with little motivation or definition. Hedges seems to have been aiming for precociousness; falling short, he lands at plain awkwardness. The film also tiptoes around any deeper exploration of the strangeness of his and Frances’s relationship – at times they seem suspiciously intimate for a mother and son, at others, thoroughly lukewarm. This relationship, though clearly meant to be the crux of the piece, is handled like a curio, at arm’s length, so that by the time the inevitable emotional revelations roll around we’re still left wondering how these two misshapen humans could or ever did fit together.

All this aside, there is the wider issue of audiences’ appetite for stories about deeply unlikeable ‘one-percenters’. French Exit wants us to engage with its enormously privileged characters on their own terms, making it feel somewhat incompatible with this time and climate. While the trials, tribulations, and romantic entanglements of the rich and fabulous have and always will make for fantastic creative fodder, there must be something redemptive buried in the story’s telling, whether well-tuned satire or simple, succulent schadenfreude. French Exit never indulges us with a glimpse into the Prices’ once-opulent and hedonistic lifestyle, denying us the pleasure of lavish farce such as that in HBO’s Succession. It also keeps its emotional cards too close to its chest, robbing its characters of any meaningful or lasting humanisation. This leaves us with a group of down-on-their-luck élites, bemoaning their scuttled fortunes as they sip martinis and cycle through the streets of Paris – not an easy sell in a post-GFC, post-Occupy Wall Street, mid-Jeff Bezos world. Even a scene early on, in which Malcolm discovers an array of dead bodies in the cruise ship’s morgue, leaves a strange aftertaste in the wake of Covid-19 and its toll on elderly holidaymakers. In this and many other moments, French Exit brushes up against rich opportunity – for comedy, drama, or satire – and seizes nearly none of it. It just doesn’t seem particularly interested in being a comedy, or a drama, or a satire. Much like its lead characters, French Exit doesn’t seem interested in anything other than itself.

French Exit (Sony Pictures Classics), 110 minutes, is now showing in cinemas.