Even if its plot didn’t center around the staging of an off-Broadway play, there would be no denying that “The French Italian” is a theater kid movie. Its approach to comedy is ripped straight from the world of musical cast parties and improv shows, with every performer doing their best to turn every line into a GIF-able burst of wholesome self-deprecation. Even its most mean-spirited plotline, in which a married couple assemble a fake theater production to humiliate their ex-neighbor whose noisiness prompted them to move, is presented as more of a gentle exercise in silliness than anything truly vindictive. The fact that the entire movie builds to a climax in a New York black box theater was an inevitability that makes it all seem intentional.
Boasting a cast of faces you’ll recognize — and names you probably won’t — from the New York comedy scene, Rachel Wolther’s film follows Valerie and Doug (Catherine Cohen and Aristotle Athari), a married Brooklyn couple who insist they just want to get some decent sleep. But that lie they tell themselves masks a deeper truth: They’re bored and need a new source of excitement. And the arrival of some suspicious new neighbors presents an opportunity that solves one problem while worsening the other.
These new downstairs neighbors live a life that’s completely at odds with Valerie and Doug’s comfortable monotony: they’re constantly fighting and singing loud karaoke, and the volatile relationship becomes a source of entertainment that our protagonists follow as if its a true crime podcast. Valerie and Doug start filling their days with speculation about the strange relationship: Is he abusing her? Is she abusing him? Is their entire a life a facade for something more sinister?
But the intellectual stimulation of judging one’s neighbors isn’t 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 score points for recounting this story to a group of artsy friends at a party, but everyone berates their stupidity for allowing strangers to force them out of such a great apartment. The mistake tortures them, which prompts the couple to try and solve the mystery by producing a fake play in an attempt to get their ex-neighbor Mary (Chloe Cherry) to audition. Their encounter with her only makes them madder, prompting them to actually stage this play and cast her as part of a larger revenge scheme.
Wolther’s choice to use a Brooklyn cocktail party as a framing device for the entire film is a clever one, as “The French Italian” is constructed entirely out of banter that you’d hear at the afterparty for your friend’s comedy show that you didn’t really want to attend. The humor gets grating at times, but the film deserves some credit for knowing exactly what it wants to be. It’s the kind of New York comedy that’s more influenced by 2020s “Saturday Night Live” humor than Woody Allen movies, and Wolther executes that vision with inoffensively colorful cinematography and a breezy script that never asks you to think too much.
Ultimately, “The French Italian” has far more to say about navigating the mundanities of a stable and pleasant relationship in your thirties than about theatre, revenge, or noisy neighbors. Valerie and Doug have been punished to a life of DINK contentment: they’re comfortable in every way that counts, but without a quest that adds structure to their lives and drives them to get out of bed every morning, they start looking for battles that they have no business fighting. In some of the prime years of their lives, they devote the bulk of their energy to neurotically pursuing more and more comfort and serenity, only to drive themselves a bit insane in the process.
The film appears to be made by and for the kinds of people who might find themselves in a similar state of cozy ennui. If you’re drowning in comfort, you might find “The French Italian” to be a comforting watch.
Grade: C+
“The French Italian” is now playing at the Quad Cinema in New York City. It expands to Los Angeles on Friday, October 10 before hitting VOD on October 28.
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