“The French Italian” is a dizzy comedy that loses its fizz when it wears out the possibilties of its original premise, but gets some of it back by finding a few other screwy directions to take us.
Writer-director Rachel Wolther’s debut feature dips its toe in New York stereotypes but reaches for broader statements on Gen X “relationships” and Gen Z misanthropy. It doesn’t quite deliver the laughs or insights it could, but the players make it bubble by without much effort showing.
“Saturday Night Live” alumnus Aristotle Athari and Catherine Cohen (“Only Murders in the Building”) are Doug and Val, a couple that traffics in cute and obsesses about their social circle and whether it’s shrinking, and about their rent-controlled brownstone, which they tell their friends they “had to give up” because of annoying, noisy neighbors.
Doug and Val regale one and all about the stranger who lived the downstairs garden apartment, pretty much without incident, until some bottle blonde moved in and brought her karaoke machine with her.
That atonal, Spanish-mangling “La Bamba” that interrupts their tranquility?
“It’s the neighbors!”
“It’s not Lou Diamond Phillips,” that’s for sure.
First Doug and then Val take their circle of friends through what they suffered — the bad singing, the wee Pomeranian and the loud arguments. They speculate and judge them — ill-mannered, people without boundaries, unconcerned about anybody but themselves, self-absorbed Gen Zers.
“Abusive relationship?”
“It’s textbook, really.”
“Sooooooo textbook.”
Their friends sympathize. Their friends criticize. They “gave up” a rent controlled townhouse flat? Without confronting them? Without getting REVENGE?
“Give it a googs,” they’re nagged. The blonde is an “actress” fresh out of Wesleyan. “Rich,” they decide. Spoiled. “Untalented” based on her singing.
Before Doug and Val can back out of it, a plot is hatched, their friend the “police sketch artist” and sometime actress Wendy (Ruby McCollister) is onboard, booking “a space” and promising to help with a fake audition for a fake play that will humiliate and put this Mary Dancyger in her place.
So much for “Maybe I should call her and yell at her.”
As Doug and slacker-at-every-job-she’s-ever-lost Val piece together details that they can work into the audition that will sting — the broken bong and annoying dog that were the source of Mary and the guy she moved in with’s arguments — “The French Italian” sets up as a mean-spirited and somewhat cowardly revenge farce.
But when they lure Mary into their “space,” they’re half-amused, half-appalled. “Untalented” doesn’t cover it. From her dye-job to her cartoonish;y large lips to her expressionless Gen Z stare, Mary is unfit to be on a stage, in a commercial or anything where “acting” is required.
Some viewers might be inclined to pity her. Not Doug and Val. It’s just that they can’t ever seem to pull the trigger on confronting her, dropping the charade and having their revenge.
From that first instruction from Wendy about how to use “Annnnd…SCENE,” they’re hooked.
The script becomes a struggle to rationalize what they’re doing and make it funny, and how to find laughs in the umpteenth Gen Z putdown and what this exercise says about this entitled couple of Gen
X wimps.
Cohen brings the right energy to brassy Val and makes the couples’ bitchy banter sing. But her best scenes are at her office, where we figure out in a flash why she can’t hold a job and where she’s upstaged by Larry Owen, playing her flamboyant singing, preening and reaching-his-limits-with-her-slacking boss.
Athari — he was just in “M3GAN 2” — lands a laugh here and there with variations of his attempts to “be a man” and “get on with our lives” speeches to his “committed” partner.
But writer-director Wolther struggles to make the “how bad an actress is she/how dumb are her avengers” rehearsal scenes land even low-hanging fruit laughs. So she gives up and reduces rehearsals to montages. The “relationship” dissection barely breaks the skin as the plot overreaches for a bit of pop psychology it can’t deliver.
And the third act twists, built around an actor (Ikechukwu Ufomadu of “Judas and the Black Messiah”) who has taken Val and Doug’s half-assed “play” to heart, give “The French Italian” an upbeat finish that we’d given up hope of having for the 45 minutes preceding it.
Rating: unrated
Cast: Aristotle Athari, Catherine Cohen,
Ruby McCollister, Ikechukwu Ufomadu and Chloe Cherry
Credits: Scripted and directed by Rachel Wolther. A Level 33 release.
Running time: 1:32
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