French Exit

Director: Azazel Jacobs

2020 / 113min / DCP

Based on the novel of the same name by Patrick deWitt, who also wrote the quip-laced screenplay, French Exit provides a marvelous mid-career role to Michelle Pfeiffer—subject of a recent Metrograph retro—as Frances Price, a widowed Manhattan socialite who, discovering her fortunes are severely depleted, lights out for Paris with her peevish son (Lucas Hedges) and their cat, Small Frank, whose “voice”—or, rather, the voice of Price’s late husband, provided by Tracy Letts—we periodically hear. A work of wit, vivacity, and, ultimately, enormous warmth, anchored by Pfeiffer’s performance as the diva-ish, chain-smoking, martini-swilling Price.

Introduction and Q&A with director Azazel Jacobs and actor Lucas Hedges on Saturday, October 26thh