Hello and welcome to another exclusive Ball Out screening review!
For this particular screening, I watched an exclusive screening of the unreleased movie “French Exit”.
I was excited to learn that the lighthearted comedic drama was completely up my alley and so easy to get wrapped up in. The main characters featured a high maintenance widowed woman (Michelle Pfeiffer) who burned through her dead husband’s large inheritance, and her son (Lucas Hedges) who left his fiancé and life in New York City behind to flee to Paris with his mother.
I was honestly a bit confused with his choice in this after learning they never really had that great of a relationship and his mother was rarely in his life as a child, so why was this adult man so ok with leaving his loving fiancé and taking his life to a completely different country? My thoughts throughout the first half of the movie were that the mother was exceedingly coldhearted and selfish, but as the movie went on and followed her journey in Paris I found myself warming up to her dry sense of humor and my ability to relate to her.
The mother (Pfieffer) told her financial advisor in the beginning, “My plan was to die before the money ran out, but I kept, and keep not dying”. That gave me a good laugh. The movie began with her breaking her son out of boarding school as a preteen and ended on the same note, which I thought was an awesome choice on the writer’s behalf. I also loved the hidden undertones throughout the film shown; the cat they brought with them held the spirit of her dead husband, which is also kind of creepy.
The mother/son personality clash was honestly great to watch and as the movie went on it was so fun to watch their relationship grow. I do feel that this movie fell in line with a lot of my favorite chick flicks – Sex in the City, Overboard, etc. I love movies that showcase an over the top privileged lifestyle that then is so disrupted by the inconvenient realities of life. I’d like to think that this stuff really does happen.
I would most definitely recommend this film to anyone looking for a chuckle and a few eye rolls. The woman’s larger than life personality mixed with real-life human issues made me ultimately fall in love with her and I think you will too.
French Exit will be in released later this week in Los Angeles and New York.
By Jadelyn Breier
