Ira Sachs (2019)
Françoise Crémont, known to her friends and family as Frankie, has terminal cancer – to be more precise, movie-style terminal cancer. This affliction makes a sufferer look pale and interesting, gives the actor concerned the chance to keep staring death in the face but has next to no evident physical effects. The action in Ira Sachs’s latest takes place in the picturesque Portuguese town of Sintra on a single day in late summer. Frankie, a famous French actress, begins the day with a swim in the pool of the large, beautiful villa she’s renting. Also staying there are her immediate family and one particular friend, all of them summoned by Frankie for a farewell get-together. She’s on the go much of the day, walking and talking. During the afternoon, she does have a bit of a turn, brought on by the exertions of scrabbling around in woodland for a vastly expensive piece of jewellery her son has petulantly chucked there. After returning to the villa for a nap and sex with her husband, however, Frankie is refreshed and ready for another walk – this time to the top of a hill. When she gets there she’s not even out of breath.
The hilltop, referred to throughout Frankie as ‘la peninha‘, is where the title character (Isabelle Huppert) has decreed her nearest and dearest should assemble to cap off their stay in Sintra. The line-up includes her ex-husband, Michel (Pascal Greggory), a Paris restaurateur, as well as his successor, Jimmy (Brendan Gleeson), who, says Frankie, has ‘done very well’ in whatever his career is. Paul (Jérémie Renier), Frankie’s son by Michel, works in finance and is soon to move to a job in New York. Sylvia (Vinette Robinson), Jimmy’s daughter from a previous marriage, is accompanied by her husband, Ian (Ariyon Bakare), another money man, and their teenage daughter, Maya (Sennia Nanua). Although Frankie is written directly for the screen, it’s not just the concentrated timeframe that suggests a theatre piece: different pairs of characters take uninterrupted turns in the spotlight to describe themselves and their problems. Sylvia’s bored with Ian and is planning to leave him; Maya – in whom she has confided, without putting her husband in the picture – is therefore doubly angry with Sylvia (so angry that she calls her Sylvia, which Maya knows will annoy her mother). Paul’s romances are always short-lived; Frankie hopes to die knowing she has changed that, through New York-based Ilene (Marisa Tomei), a movie hair stylist: she and Ilene have been fast friends since working together some years ago. But Ilene arrives in Sintra with Gary (Greg Kinnear), a film cameraman and would-be director, with whom she’s in a relationship. And so on …
As in Sachs’s Love is Strange (2014) and Little Men (2016), challenging real-estate costs are an issue. Ilene and Gary discuss their options in New York. Sylvia’s struggling to find a place in London that she can afford to rent alone. On the fringes of the gathering is Portuguese tour guide Tiago (Carloto Cotta), usually seen in the company of Michel: to earn a decent living, Tiago spends half the year in Sintra, far from his wife, child and home in a poorer part of Portugal. Unlike the two previous Sachs films, Frankie also features plenty of talk about the complications of affluence. Frankie says her Paris apartment is valued at thirty million euros. She makes Paul a present of her gold-and-diamonds bracelet – worth €40,000, she says – presumably so that it won’t be part of her eventual estate (and presumably in the hope it will end up on Ilene’s wrist). The fate of this contemptuously rejected gift points up another Sachs trademark – not following things through. After struggling to find the bracelet in the wood, Frankie promptly forgets about it. This time around, Sachs and Mauricio Zacharias (his usual co-writer) also branch out into verbal non-sequiturs. When Paul, exasperated by Frankie’s match-making, reminds her that most mothers don’t think anyone is good enough for their son, she replies that wasn’t the case with her mother who was happy for Frankie to marry, in Michel, a homosexual. Come again?
The gay aspect in Frankie is much less central than in Love is Strange or its predecessor in the Sachs filmography, Keep the Lights On (2012); it’s also more confusing. Are we meant to think that Michel is using Tiago as more than a tour guide? (If Tiago is only the latter, he’s exceedingly attentive to Michel.) According to the protagonist, her mother knew about Michel’s sexuality before Frankie married him; according to Jimmy, it was only after he was married to her and Michel phoned to tell her he was in a relationship with a man that the penny dropped with Frankie – to her consternation. It’s possible, of course, that one character or another isn’t telling the truth but since there’s next to no evidence that Sachs and Zacharias are interested in such complication, it’s safer to assume they’re just being careless. In the first exchange between Paul and Sylvia, which takes place in Frankie’s room with her son sprawling on his mother’s bed and jocosely insulting Sylvia, he sounds like he’s expressing his inner bitch. You wonder if this why Paul’s relationships with women don’t last but it’s later implied there’s a more garish reason for the uneasy combativeness between him and Sylvia. In a dialogue with Ilene, Paul reveals that, when they were teenagers, he made love to his half-sister-to-be.
This is only technically a dialogue because Paul monopolises it. Since Ilene, before he gets going, asks him not to tell her family secrets, it’s hard to think she wouldn’t continue to protest while he carries on blabbing. As far as Sachs is concerned, though, Ilene might as well not be there: he keeps the camera on Paul exclusively. A more effective one-sided conversation involves Jimmy and Tiago. Here, Tiago does nearly all the talking – he wonders if it’s worth staying married when his possessive wife is always suspicious he’s involved with other women in Sintra – but both he and Jimmy face the camera throughout Tiago’s monologue. Jimmy’s silence is eloquent and, of course, encapsulates the supposedly tragic irony of Frankie: it’s the one happy partnership in evidence, that of Frankie and Jimmy, that’s doomed to end soon. Though not, it transpires, as soon as Ilene’s and Gary’s mismatch. Frankie clearly has a vested interest in getting Gary out of the way: once she tells him she can’t be in the movie he wants to make, he ends things with Ilene, who’s more relieved than heartbroken.
There are flickers of another happy coupling in prospect when Maya, who wisely decides to spend time on a beach away from her parents, chats there with local teenager Pedro (Manuel Sá Nogueira) but this interaction ends uneasily and Maya, when she returns, instantly seeks the embrace of her mother. It seems her father really is as boring as Sylvia thinks because Maya ignores him entirely. This note is giving a lot of tedious detail about the various liaisons in the story but how else to convey their dominance in Frankie? The film is soapy, shallow yet pretentious: not for the first time, Sachs asserts depth by filling the soundtrack with classical music (Schubert, Debussy and Johann Strauss), supported by Dickon Hinchliffe’s chi-chi score. The beach where Maya hangs out with Pedro is the Praia das Maçãs – ‘Beach of the Apples’. A website for Sintra[1] explains that this ‘is a golden sandy beach at the mouth of the river which gives it its name: as the story goes, during the autumn, the river would carry with it apples from the farms it ran through …’ Pedro, in contrast, tells Maya that the beach is named for the Garden of Eden apple that Adam gave to Eve. This may be the most interesting line in the whole film. Is it meant to show that youngsters nowadays are scripturally ignorant? Or that they automatically assume that ‘Man’s First Disobedience’ must have been all the fault of the man? Or does Pedro’s error reflect the scriptwriters’ own understanding and/or interpretation of Genesis?
Frankie unquestionably wastes a cumulatively prodigious amount of acting talent but some cast members are still more successful than others. The former group includes Brendan Gleeson, Sennia Nanua, Carlota Cotta (so good in Diamantino) and, especially, emotionally fluid Marisa Tomei. It’s striking that all three francophone actors seem uncomfortable speaking English to a degree that Ira Sachs surely can’t have intended: Pascal Greggory is particularly awkward, even with relatively little to say. Getting Isabelle Huppert for the lead must have seemed a wonderful casting coup (irreproachable even to the ‘identity casting’ lobby) yet she doesn’t feel right for the part as written. Sachs and Zacharias have conceived Frankie according to some hackneyed ideas of the ‘typical’ actress that are alien to Huppert’s essential screen persona. For example, when Frankie starts on about Ilene being the right partner for Paul, Jimmy accuses her, albeit light-heartedly, of ‘playing Cupid again’ – a role it’s not easy to accept Isabelle Huppert in. She isn’t helped either by Sachs’s flat-footed staging of an episode where a woman recognises Frankie and begs her to put in an appearance at an alfresco birthday party that’s taking place. Frankie obliges and listens as the birthday girl (Júlia Guerra), eighty-eight today and one of her greatest fans, rattles on about how marvellous it is that Frankie has beaten cancer. Huppert’s strong no-nonsense streak makes it hard to believe Frankie would sit and suffer through this.
To be fair to Isabelle Huppert, she does have some more convincing wordless moments. What should be the most powerful comes right at the end but Sachs botches this, too. High on la peninha, Frankie looks down below at Jimmy and Ilene, who happen to have walked up together. The sun, needless to say, is setting; there’s a slight chill in the air; Jimmy lends Ilene a scarf. Huppert gets across Frankie’s deeply mixed feelings as she sees two people she loves getting on well together; in seeing this, she also confronts the prospect of life continuing after she’s gone. The shot of Jimmy putting the scarf round Ilene’s neck is so deliberate and protracted, however, that it gives the impression Frankie has chanced upon evidence of an intimacy that already exists between her husband and her best friend. Sachs seems preoccupied at this stage with getting his cast into position for a spectacular shot: the camera pulls back to show them as tiny figures on the crest of the hill. The composition momentarily calls to mind the great finale to The Seventh Seal (1957) but only momentarily: this is no dance of death but a choreographed curtain call. Except that it’s not even the last shot. Frankie, still full of energy, starts her descent of la peninha and the others follow. Richard Brody describes this as ‘one of the most memorable and inspired endings in recent film’. The heroine’s grand-old-Duke-of-York routine is pretty funny but if you want a really good laugh after sitting through Frankie, Brody’s New Yorker review of the film is hard to beat.
26 June 2023
