I have only seen one Ira Sachs’ film before Frankie, Love Is Strange, which I loved. I am late to the party, but I am a fan of Isabelle Hupert’s work. I also love movies that address themes of death. The cast is an embarrassment of riches, and the cast includes black people. It is shot in a beautiful, unfamiliar location. I was definitely going to see it in the theaters.
At the behest of the titular matriarch, who is also a famous actor, family and friends gather at Sintra, Portugal for a family vacation: her husband, her ex-husband and their son, her stepdaughter and her family, a tour guide and Frankie’s friend, Ilene, played by Marisa Tomei, whom she met at work, and Ilene’s boyfriend. Even though it is a vacation, no one is having a good time because they are brought together because of bad news. It is basically a day in the life of the family. We get to see how different combinations of people interact and have to deduce their relationship to each other, their individual personalities and what the future holds for them in ninety-eight minutes. It feels like a play set outdoors. I enjoyed the calm sensation of watching the movie, appreciated the excellent performances and the beauty of the relationship of people to space and each other, but in the end, it felt constructed and was ultimately the pleasurable parts did not make a satisfying, cohesive whole.
I watched Frankie hoping for the point to be about the separate and collective ways that people handle death in life, but it is really a movie that meditates on romantic relationships at different stages with a dash of implied magical realism that I did not like even though I think that it was supposed to provide some sort of denouement satisfaction, which I did not need nor was I looking for. It ended up undercutting every textured and complex emotion and interaction that came before. I was unaware that the momentum of the movie was hurtling towards a resolution of how a specific character would be able to move on, and honestly it cheapened the movie because it felt as if it was an ensemble movie and not even the titular character was the protagonist yet one character is treated as if he was based on the overarching trajectory of the story. Is this movie about Frankie, this day in the life of a group of people and completely immersing oneself in this moment no matter how dissonant the current pleasure and impending horror are or about reassuring us that life goes on and everything is fine? It feels more like the latter as if the fear of death and grief ultimately were too much for the filmmakers so they completed punked out and rushed to move ahead. I felt cheated. Once again, Americans can’t handle death and are eager to make a happy ending when there isn’t one at that point.
For those of you who watched Frankie and think that I’m being a reductionist, I would advise you to pay attention to the fountain, who drinks from the fountain and who watches the first character drinking from the fountain. The characters that drink from the fountain never hear the legend, but the character who does and observes the first person then the final pairing is a proxy for the audience to relate to because we know as much as he does, and in some ways, more because we see all the character interactions. This movie is a mournful meet cute, which retroactively turned me off. It was too tidy, too early. Also the transition between the shot when one of the final pair is alone then talking with the other had a clumsy transition that ruined the end for me. It was poorly juxtaposed.
I’m fairly certain that I missed numerous references that added a deeper meaning to Frankie such as the significance of the music, which I did not recognize, the cold, and the Catholic references, which were different from my layman’s Protestant understanding of the Bible, specifically the Adam and Eve story with the apple. It is possible that the story was deliberately told in a nontraditional way so it could track with the message that Sachs was trying to convey in the movie. The idea that Adam tempted Eve with the apple speech at the beach is later echoed in another beach story from the past, but the parallel without the Biblical story did not work for me. It could be because I’m from Manhattan, and I’m an American from a lower socioeconomic background whereas the youngest character is not originally from a city though she lives in one and is comfortable, but her storyline made me nervous, and if it was unfolding in the US, it would make most viewers nervous. If you think that I’m overreacting or am too sensitive, imagine if the scene took place on any American beach, all the characters were American, don’t change the gender and pay attention to who touches her bookbag. It would be the beginning of a Law & Order episode, not a story about young love awakened. I concede that I was nervous for no reason, but Sachs is also an American and a New Yorker yet the cultural cues are so different. Is it a cultural divide based on gender? Women do see warning signs where men would not. The young actors are less deft at making the material better than it is on the page than their fellow cast mates so it probably did not help.
Also I have a very subjective anxiety trigger when someone throws away something of any level of value. I then obsess about the logistics of solving the situation instead of the significance in the movie. It is not fair to Frankie, but I was probably disproportionately concerned about a certain object than I needed to be, and retroactively was thinking about the prior interaction with it more than I should have.
Huppert’s scenes are unsurprisingly the best, especially the party, which was the most powerful moment for me and could have been the entire movie. The son’s scenes played younger than it should have, and it did not work for me. The ex and tour guide’s scenes, which do flesh out the various stages of relationships theme that I did not like, felt extraneous, and though they were well acted, I would have cut them. The Americans held their own and surpassed some of their European counterparts as an interesting somewhat oblivious contrast to the family in terms of priorities and ways of interacting. The stepdaughter’s family’s story is the one that I really wanted a resolution, but am fine with not having one since it is just a day in the life.
Frankie was a wonderful journey, but I think that the filmmakers ultimately dodged the most powerful aspect of the film and stayed in their comfort zone to make a happy ending instead of a deeply felt one. It was a disappointing, pulled punch that did not work for me. If you love the cast or Portugal, definitely give it a chance.