Playing a 65-year-old New York high-society widow who burns through her savings and moves to Paris with her son in Azazel Jacobs', Michelle Pfeiffer sucks the juice from each line like a Louisianan devouring a crawfish. It's a full-on diva turn — a smorgasbord of side-eye and shade, of lacerating one-liners dispatched between drags on cigarettes and slurps of martinis.
As he proved in two other sensitive studies of oddballs , Jacobs is a deft commingler of tones and registers; he makes space for both grotesquerie and pathos, and knows how to locate the latter in the former. Here, the director and cast build a mood of disarming madcap silliness, then pierce it with moments of melancholy that temper the quirkitude. It's a balancing act thatThe movie opens with a flashback of Frances breaking a preteen Malcolm out of boarding school.
On the cruise to Paris, Frances and Malcolm become entangled — in Malcolm's case, literally — with a medium named Madeleine . Once they settle in the City of Light, their circle expands to include other assorted eccentrics, like lonely, widowed American expat Madame Reynaud and soft-spoken detective Julius .
Azazel?
Anything about the cat?
I would love to see Michelle get an Oscar. Maybe this one will give her a shot. Such a fine actress. TheAcademy
How does anyone move to Paris when they run out of money? The entire premise seems ridiculous.
It’s Mister Catt
Please keep the cat safe. WhatICareAboutInMovies
So France isn’t leaving the European Union?
Wait... if I run out of money I can just move to fucking Paris?!?
So relatable... I ran out of money so I'll mope in Paris...
THE CAT!
The cat tho cheerioo