Tribeca Review: Terrible Neighbors in "The French Italian"

by Abe Friedtanzer

Everyone has had an inconsiderate neighbor at some point in their lives, someone who can’t understand, or doesn’t seem to care, that their actions – and likely the noises emanating from their place of residence – affect those around them. In part because people can be crazy, most don’t confront these nuisances and instead find workarounds that may lead to a drastic decrease in their own comfort.

The comedy The French Italian takes that idea to a new level, as its protagonists hatch a revenge plan that’s half-baked at best and better described as entirely aimless and lackluster...

Doug (Aristotle Athari) and Valerie (Catherine Cohen) arrive at a party to regale the friends they haven’t seen in far too long with a tale of their truly awful brownstone neighbors on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, who spent almost as much time using a karaoke machine that reverberates through the old walls as they do screaming at each other in the courtyard. So frustrated that they were convinced to give up their rent-controlled apartment to temporarily relocate to Doug’s parents’ empty home in the suburbs, they’re baited into action when someone looks up one of the neighbors, Mary (Chloe Cherry). It turns out she’s an actress, so the natural next step is… to make up a play so that they can get her to confess to all she’s put them through without realizing it.

This scheme is hair-brained from the start, evidenced by Doug and Valerie’s complete lack of forethought in the first meeting where they literally have Mary read one prepared scene before letting her leave. Their accomplice Wendy (Ruby McCollister) is a devoted actress who wants the play to be real and infuses much more of herself into this elaborate prank than she should. Doug and Valerie, however oblivious that may be to it, are also wasting even more of their lives than they were when they couldn’t sleep, renting a rehearsal space and even penning a full miserably-written play to fuel their increasingly senseless plan.

There are laughs to be found in writer-director Rachel Wolther’s feature debut (her next project has Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Lucy Liu, and Octavia Spencer attached), but they stem mostly from the portrait of a marriage that finds Doug and Valerie bonding over this shared obsession with revenge. They were already too much in each other’s space when Valerie was out of work and Doug was working from home, and now they’ve found something to pour their energy into that temporary gives them life even as it simultaneously sucks it out of them.

Athari, one of the stars of this year’s underrated Molli and Max in the Future, and Cohen, whose credits including Dating & New York, are a fun pair who embody these characters with an effective mix of laziness and peculiar passion. Cherry, best known for Euphoria, does an entertaining take on energy-less bad acting, and McCollister gives the film its enthusiasm with her committed performance as the friend who just wants to be noticed and throws all of herself into every single thing she does, whether or not the situation calls for it. There are echoes of reality in the circumstances that fuel this film’s plot, and where it goes once its characters decide to act, especially towards the end of the film, is far less believable but still decent fun. B-

The French Italian makes its world premiere in the US Narrative Competition at the 2024 Tribeca Festival.