Although its plot did not centen on the stakening of an off-Broadway game, it would not deny that “The French Italian“Is a theater child film. Its attitude to comedy is demolished directly from the world by Musical parties And Improv shows, with every artist who does his best to turn each line into a GIF capable blast of healthy self-impairment. Even its most meaningful plotline, where a married couple gathers a false theater production to humiliate their ex-neighbor whose sounds made them move, are presented as more a mild exercise in finesse than something that really waves. The fact that the entire film is being built into a climax in a New York Black Box theater was an inevitability that makes everything seem intentional.
With a role of faces that you recognize – and names you probably won’t come – from the New York comedy scene, Rachel Wolther’s film Follows Valerie and Doug (Catherine Cohen and Aristotle Athari), a married Brooklyn couple who insists that they just want to get some decent sleep. But the lie they say themselves masks a deeper truth: they are bored and need a new source of excitement. And the arrival of some suspected new neighbors provides an opportunity that solves a problem while worsening the other.
These new neighbors downstairs live a life that is completely in violation of Valerie and Doug’s comfortable monotony: they are constantly struggling and singing loud karaoke, and the volatile relationship becomes a source of entertainment that our main characters follow as if it is a True Crime Podcast. Valerie and Doug start to fill their days with speculation about the strange relationship: does he abuse her? Does she abuse him? Is their entire lives a facade for something more ominous?
But the intellectual stimulation of assessing their neighbors is not enough to make the noise tolerable, and Doug and Valerie soon give up their rent -controlled apartment to move to the suburbs. They expect to get points to tell this story to a group of strange friends at a party, but everyone touches their stupidity to let strangers force them out of such a large apartment. The error tortures them, which urges the couple to try to solve the mystery by producing a false game in an attempt to get their ex-Neighbor Mary (Chloe Cherry) to audition. Their meeting with her just makes them crazy, which makes them actually arrange this game and throw her as part of a larger revenge system.
Wolther’s Choice to use a Brooklyn cocktail party as a framing unit for the entire movie is a smart one, because “The French Italian” is constructed entirely out of the jokes that you would listen to the after -party of your friend’s comedy show that you didn’t really want to participate. The humor sometimes gets grid, but the movie deserves some credit to know exactly what it wants to be. It is the kind of New York comedy that is more influenced by 2020 -Tal “Saturday Night Live” humor than Woody Allen films, and Wolther performs that vision with unoffensively colorful cinematography and a windy script that never asks you to think too much.
In the end, “the French Italian” has much more to say about navigating weekdays in a stable and pleasant relationship in the thirties than about theater, revenge or noisy neighbors. Valerie and Doug have been punished for a life with DINK satisfaction: they are comfortable in every way that counts, but without a mission that adds the structure of their lives and drives them to get out of bed every morning, they start looking for battles that they have no business fighters. During some of the main years of their lives, they devote most of their energy to neurotic striving for more and more comfort and calm, just to drive a little crazy in the process.
The film seems to be made by and for the types of people who can be in a similar state of cozy Ennui. If you are drowning in comfort, you can find “the French Italian” as a comforting clock.
Rating: C+
“The French Italian” now plays at Quad Cinema in New York City. It expands to Los Angeles on Friday, October 10 before he met Vod on October 28.
Want to keep you updated on IndieWire’s movie Reviews And critical thoughts? Subscribe here To our recently launched newsletter, in review by David Ehrlich, where our main film critic and Head Review’s editor rounds off the best new reviews and streaming choices along with some exclusive Musings – all only available for subscribers.
