Director Rachel Wolther’s indie feature “The French Italian” is a very funny and sharp satire of New Yorkers in their early 30’s who are sadly incapable of accurately evaluating and responding to the behavior of others. It begins streaming October 28.
Valerie (Catherine Cohen) and Doug (Aristotle Athari) are a head over heels in love couple and the lucky residents of a rent-stabilized brownstone in the upper west-side of Manhattan. They are a self-identified “dink” couple: double income, no kids. Doug works from home and Valerie is unemployed but will soon score a new job preparing project decks for an advertising firm. They fill their days wearing pajama bottoms, cracking each other up with inside jokes and snarky observations. Everything is copacetic until their downstairs neighbor (Jon Rudnitsky) invites his girlfriend Mary (Chloe Cherry) and her dog to move in with him. The younger couple fight, play loud karaoke for hours and make their upstairs neighbors (whom they never meet) miserable. “Who plays karaoke in a 130-year-old brownstone?” asks Valerie.
They flake out when it comes to actually confronting their noisy neighbors; they won’t even call the police for fear that they often make domestic violence situations worse. (They suspect the man is beating his girlfriend.) Despite, as a friend exclaims, “Noone gives up a rent-stabilized apartment!” they leave to live for free in a parent’s empty home in Connecticut. Relating this all to friends at party (in the beginning of the film) they come with a plan to “punk” the obnoxious couple who made them flee the city. Discovering that Mary is an actress, they invite her to audition for a one-act play they are going to put on which will slyly dramatize the abuse Mary, her boyfriend and her dog caused them.
They are aided in their wild premise by actor friend Wendy (Ruby McCollister), who organizes the audition, rehearsal process and eventual play. Chloe Cherry (the former porn actress who burst into mainstream acting in the HBO series “Euphoria”) is perfect as Mary, a thin, blonde with bee-stung lips and a slacker attitude and vacuous credulity that makes her an easy prey for their revenge plot. She has to take part in ridiculous acting exercises (Mary’s word association response to “misery” is “Kathy Bates!”) as the trio strings her along, promising her a script they haven’t yet written. They are hoping to find out whether her boyfriend is beating her up at which point they may call it all off, but she is so surprisingly good at countering this (“How did you know I live in the upper west-side?”) Wendy, Val and Doug wind up writing the script (naming it after a brand of coffee they see at Zabars, the famous Manhattan upscale grocery Val is addicted to), adding a new cast member (a marvelous Ikechukwu Ufomadu, who winds up as the savior of the show) and renting a venue for a single performance of the work.
Valerie and Doug self-identify as “good people” and yet their judgements of others are frequently suspect. A visit to Wendy’s messy studio apartment so alarms Valerie she phones Doug to tell him she worries that their collaborator may be “Charlie Romeo Alpha Zulu Yankee!” (i.e “crazy”; She had earlier boasted of learning the NATO phonetic alphabet.) A comeuppance may be in the cards for them.
This well-directed and beautifully-acted cringe comedy may not work for everyone but I enjoyed it immensely and Chloe Cherry’s performance is a revelation; her tender and naive reactions to the prankish demands of Doug and Valerie comically demonstrate that the “bad people” may be the good ones after all.