Sony Pictures Classics announced today that Azazel Jacobs’ FRENCH EXIT will be released in theaters on February 12, 2021. This follows the news that the film will make its world premiere as the Closing Night feature at the 2020 New York Film Festival.
Directed by Jacobs and written by award-winning novelist Patrick deWitt, FRENCH EXIT stars Oscar® nominee Michelle Pfeiffer, Oscar® nominee Lucas Hedges, Tony Award winner Tracy Letts, Danielle Macdonald, Valerie Mahaffey, Daniel di Tomasso, Susan Coyne, Imogen Poots, and Isaach de Bankolé. The film is based on deWitt’s international bestselling book of the same title, which was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize.
“My plan was to die before the money ran out,” says 60-year-old penniless Manhattan socialite Frances Price (Michelle Pfeiffer), but things didn’t go as planned. Her husband Franklin has been dead for 12 years and with his vast inheritance gone, she cashes in the last of her possessions and resolves to live out her twilight days anonymously in a borrowed apartment in Paris, accompanied by her directionless son Malcolm (Lucas Hedges) and a cat named Small Frank—who may or may not embody the spirit of Frances’s dead husband (Tracy Letts).
Sony Pictures Classics acquired the film last September, shortly before production began in Montreal and Paris. A Canadian/Irish international co-production, FRENCH EXIT is produced by Elevation Pictures, Screen Siren Pictures, and Blinder Films, and executive produced by Rocket Science.