Frankie: Stilted Drama As Dysfunctional as the Family at Its Centre

By Liam Lacey

Rating: C

Ira Sachs’ Frankie stars Isabelle Huppert and a multinational cast including Marissa Tomei and Brendan Gleason in a drama set over the course of a day where everyone is making a big life decision.

Huppert plays Frankie, a renowned, imperious French film and television actress (no great stretch) who has gathered her friends and family together in a villa near the picturesque Portuguese town of Sintra, to share a summer holiday and some important family news.

Frankie, we learn, makes her own rules in life. When we first see her, sliding off her robe and stepping into a hotel pool, topless, a relative reminds her that there are guests in the hotel and she might be photographed. “It’s alright,” says Frankie. “I’m very photogenic.”

Frankie, it turns out, has an agenda. After two years of remission, her cancer has returned and she expects to die soon, so some family matters must be settled. In addition to her husband Jimmy (Gleeson), the group includes Sylvia (Vinette Robinson), his daughter from an earlier marriage, who’s on the verge of breaking up with her husband Ian (Ariyon Bakare) to the despair of their teenaged daughter, Maya.

Then there's Frankie's moody and resentful financier son Paul (Jeremie Renier) and his father Michel (Pascal Greggory), a French restauranteur who came out as gay after his marriage to Frankie ended. Flying in from New York is movie hair stylist Ilene (Tomei) who Frankie hopes to set up with Paul, who is planning to move to the States. But Ilene shows up followed by boyfriend Gary (Greg Kinnear), a movie director of photography working on a Star Wars sequel (“George Lucas has been very good to me”) who is more interested in her than she is in him. In any case, Frankie's matchmaking plans seem doomed to go astray, because Paul, wise to his mother’s machinations, is openly rude to Ilene.

Meanwhile Maya meets a cute local boy, who takes her to the Praia das Maçãs (Apple Beach), which he tells her is named after the apple in Garden of Eden. It isn’t — it’s name after local apple orchards — but we get the unmissable point: Humans and their relationship problems spoil paradise. The theme is underscored by a tour guide who complains that his wife, left alone for months while he works, is bitterly jealous.

Sachs and co-writer Mauricio Zacharias are best known for intimate New York-set dramas (Keep The Lights On, Little Men, Love Is Strange). On this broader painterly canvas, the writers are attempting to create something deliberately European, indebted to the talky films of Eric Rohmer or bittersweet dramas of Anton Chekhov. The result is a work stiff with pointed talk and chance encounters, little of which feels original. The acting, while variable, often has a stilted, recitative quality, as if the characters, rather than family members, recently met at a script readings.

In particular, Huppert’s rushed English sentences have a quality of false archness which sound like she’s remembering lines from her old movie scripts: “I hate that word 'mature,' it's offensive to a woman." Or, “Can’t you pretend that you accept my fate?” Or, “I try never to confuse money and love."

The backdrops of misty forest roads, old churches, and hillside steeples were shot by cinematographer Rui Pocas (Zama) who captures a quality of fairytale lightness, making Frankie better as a travelogue than a moving drama.

Frankie. Directed by Ira Sachs. Written by Ira Sachs and Mauricio Zacharias. Starring Isabelle Huppert, Brendan Gleason, Marissa Tomei and Greg Kinnear. Opens November 8 at Toronto’s Canada Square; opens November 15 in Montreal, and throughout the fall/winter in other cities.