125: all things odd

A rewatch and some recently logged

COMMUNITY BOARD

Goodreads / Letterboxd / Instagram / Writers Against the War on Gaza (WAWOG)

• RAFTM Hannah Ziegler launched a newsletter,

  Fan Mail
  , where she dives into fandom culture: “Fan Mail will be an arena to explore the dichotomy between fan-artist relations, and what we get out of sending messages in bottles…I’m going to be diving deep into early internet-era fan clubs and their leaders (‘cc: MileyWorld), the 2009 TV series My Date with…, PO box success stories, the evolution of the meet & greet, and so much more.” Hannah doesn’t do anything without intention so there’s no other person I trust to do this topic justice.

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For Your (Re)Consideration is a segment where I revisit things I didn’t like or I am ready to change my mind about.

Of the movies starring Lucas Hedges as a lost young man traveling abroad by ship with an older woman, I prefer Steven Soderbergh’s Let Them All Talk (2020) over Azazel Jacobs’ French Exit (2020). The former is witty and tender, the latter ridiculous and dull (or so I remembered). My only real memory of French Exit was what my Letterboxd review told me—that I disliked it enough to give it two stars. I hadn’t noted why and I couldn’t remember any real details about the movie itself. Last weekend, Metrograph put on a Jacobs’ retrospective titled “The Intimate Absurd,” where they screened French Exit alongside Jacobs’ other films like Momma’s Man and his latest, His Three Daughters. Despite making it a project for myself to rewatch things that I had a strong negative reaction to the first time around, I had no particular interest in revisiting French Exit. It’s not a movie that has some secret depth or formal brilliance to it that I didn’t have the capacity to appreciate at the time. But, after some convincing from a friend and the lure of a post-screening Q&A with Lucas Hedges, I purchased seat G6 in Metrograph’s Theater 1 and tried to keep an open mind.

Adapted from Patrick DeWitt’s novel of the same name, French Exit follows Frances and Malcolm (played by Michelle Pfieffer and Lucas Hedges), a mother and son still grieving the death of the family patriarch. When their accountant informs them that a decade or so of thoughtless spending has left them with barely a penny to their name, the two head to Paris, where they’ll keep doing exactly what they’ve been doing and spending how they’ve been spending. While their present closeness might suggest that their relationship is another case of longterm separation anxiety, Malcolm reminds his mother that their relationship really begun when she “came for him.” He’s referring to the moment when, following the abrupt death of his father, she suddenly appeared at his boarding school and took him out of school indefinitely. They’ve done everything together since. Childhood estrangement becomes adolescent and adulthood codependency. I’m not familiar with Jacobs’ other work but the Metrograph promo described his oeuvre as “intimate character-driven films about fraught families and everyday obstacles that combine dramatic heft with an off-center, at times slightly surreal sense of humor.” French Exit easily fits this description, though the dramatic heft was sometimes hard to find and the moving intimacy of the opening scene—when Frances picks up Malcolm from boarding school—and the closing scene—as they drive off from the boarding school, their car disappearing behind the autumn trees—is unmatched by everything in between. Watching a second time, I didn’t find it as offensive as a two-star review suggests I did during my first watch. But I also found it to be a bit shallow and its oddness too forced. Ann Hornaday, reviewing the movie for The Washington Post, described it as existing “in a world that might have sprung fully formed from the quirkiest recesses of Wes Anderson’s imagination, with drops of DNA from Whit Stillman’s WASP catalogue.” This is a matter of opinion, of course, but I’ve always found the quirkiness of Anderson and Stillman’s films to feel well-worn, an effect of character’s unawareness of their particularities and the film’s treatment of those particularities as completely normal. The oddball character of French Exit feels like the cinematic equivalent of Cole Sprouse as Jughead Jones going, “I’m a weirdo. I don't fit in. And I don't want to fit in. Have you ever seen me without this stupid hat on? That's weird.” I’m less willing to be generous about this particular point because of Jacobs own insistence on the unique oddity of the film. During the Q&A he mentioned that he felt that a film as odd as French Exit couldn’t be made nowadays.¹ I couldn’t help thinking, sir, have you seen The Holdovers? It’s not all bad, though. There are few moments, in addition to the opening and closing scenes, that I thought were subtle and moving—particularly the moment when the movie shows us that Frances’ “reckless” spending is less a result of a Lucille Bluth-style detachment from reality but an expression of her grief. When her accountant asks her why she has spent her money the way she has, she wryly responds that she thought she’d die before it ran out. As the movie progresses, you realize that she is basically giving it away so that she might have an excuse to die. The sharpness of these kinds of moments gets lost in the muddle of the farce that dominates most of the movie and makes them feel cheap. All in all, I left French Exit with a shrug and thought, ‘maybe it’s time to rewatch Let Them All Talk.’

RECENTLY LOGGED

• Brandon Taylor, “A Roon with a View”: With the exception of his calling Sally Rooney fans “Rooney Toons” and his exaltation of the MFA and writing workshops, I really enjoyed this review. Taylor is the only reviewer I’ve read who has mentioned Intermezzo’s resonances with Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway rather than Joyce’s Ulysses. I recognize that while Rooney explicitly references Ulysses and is said to be writing back to it in a way, what she produces is more in the aesthetic and mental space of Woolf’s novel, despite the shared modernist proclivities of both authors. Maybe I’m biased because I was reading Mrs Dalloway when I started reading Intermezzo. I also laughed out loud at Taylor’s observation of the friendlessness of the contemporary American novel: “The American literary conception of friendship is as a ranked list of class signifiers that tell us the author is an astute and funny observer of micro-niche mores among the media class, but do these works actually conjure real friendship?”

• Tia Glista, “Charlotte Wells’ ‘Aftersun’”: Tia’s writing on this film has consistently been the only thing that has made me willing to give it another chance.

• Megalopolis (2024, dir. Francis Ford Coppola): This was a tricky watch, mostly exhausting and ridiculous, but honestly no more unbearable than several films I’ve seen this year. Maybe I’m not qualified to plumb the depths of Coppola’s Emersonian mind.

• Michelle Santiago Cortés, “002: Bad Taste”

• Andrea Long Chu, “In Praise of Bad Readers”

• Sally Rooney, Intermezzo: A novel I liked more for its ideas and the execution of those ideas—she’s doing one big language-game—than for the story itself which, in this case, feels secondary.

• Lauren Elkin, Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London

• Isabella Hammad, Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative

• Anora (2024, dir. Sean Baker): Enjoyed this but respectfully (and genuinely) waiting for someone to explain to me why it won the Palme d’Or.

• Doreen St. Felix, “Girl, What Waist?”

• Rayne Fisher Quann, “against narrative”

LISTENING TO

I can’t stress enough how important Bon Iver’s new EP, SABLE, is to me. To listen to “AWARDS SEASON” first thing in the morning? That’s heaven. Also on repeat: CaseyMQ, “Baby Voice”; Sabrina Carpenter, Short ‘n Sweet but especially “Lie to Girls”; Caroline Polachek & Charli XCX, “everything is romantic”; Bon Iver & Charli XCX, “i think about it all the time”—Charli sort of screeching, “I found love BAYBAE,” really does it for me.

1. Hedges, who was surprisingly charming in person, jokingly called him out and was like, “As in 2024 versus 2019?”