1.Frankie: A Summer Movie For Our Times
“This was meant to be a family vacation!"
The titular protagonist of Ira Sachs’ latest film Frankie is only one of several characters who say something to this effect over the course of one late summer day in the picturesque Portuguese resort town of Sintra.
Family vacations are meticulously planned and end up almost always never going according to plan. Each family member has their own rhythm and their own pursuits, and it is an impossible task to keep everyone on the same page; what’s more, the older the kids are the more out of sync everybody becomes. In a foreign land there is always temptation in the air, something that amplifies senses and emotions, and widens the cracks in relationships. Usually one or both of the parents is fiercely committed to keeping things under control “for the sake of the family", but eventually they’re driven to and then pushed over the edge in an emotional blow-up. The folly is in the very attempt to bring the ordinary (one’s family) into an extraordinary environment (a vacation) and expect for things to go smoothly. This year, with the new coronavirus pandemic forcing people around the world to put their summer vacation plans on hold, even the imperfect family vacation seems like it would be a pleasant escape from our daily reality.
Frankie is the story of a dying French movie star played by Isabelle Huppert who summons her family—and one close friend—to Sintra, Portugal for one last vacation together. There’s her husband Jimmy (Brendan Gleeson), her first husband Michel (Pascal Greggory), her son Paul (Jérémie Renier), her daughter-in-law Silvia (Vinette Robinson) along with her husband Ian (Ariyon Bakare) and daughter Maya (Sennia Nanua), and her close friend Ilene (Marisa Tomei).
It turns out that Frankie has orchestrated this family vacation with some ulterior motives, driven by her intention to get her affairs in order and ensure that certain family members are set up for the future she steadfastly envisions for them. Unfortunately, her grand production is almost immediately thrown off script. Sachs captures the subtle shifts in emotion and realizations among the members of the family as they spend a day meandering around the place the English poet George Gordon Byron called “Glorious Eden". The themes of the fleetingness of life and the bonds of family are cast into relief against the backdrop of the end of summer.
The majority of films produced in Hollywood or Europe follow a similar trajectory as they are released in different regions around the world, and they almost always come to Japan last. Ample time is needed both to assess how a film fairs overseas and to roll out a marketing campaign that maximizes its chances of doing well with Japanese audiences. Such delays on the account of cultural differences are not unique to Japan; there is usually several weeks or even months between when a Hollywood film is released in Europe or a European film is released in America. Although this is increasingly not the case when it comes to event-scale blockbusters, movie fans in Japan continue to find themselves late to the global conversation around cinema.
Frankie, too, had its worldwide premier at the Cannes Film Festival back in May 2019, followed by its French release at the end of August and its American release at the end of October. Critics praised its fairy-tale like setting and Huppert’s graceful, magnetic performance. In the time since, COVID-19 has impacted our lives irrevocably, and the usual summer movie season has become a mirage. Summer 2019 feels like ages ago, and with summer 2020 we’ve entered the era of the staycation. It’s ironic, then, that Frankie’s August 2020 Japanese release makes its charms, its themes, and its message more resonant than ever.
2.French movie Star “Frankie"/Isabelle Huppert
Frankie opens with Isabelle Huppert arriving and looking out across the idyllic patio of her hotel in Sintra, Portugal. She removes her saffron-colored robe, her bikini top, then dives into the clear blue waters of the pool. When her granddaughter-in-law Maya comes up to the edge of the pool and says, “There’s people in the hotel, you know. They can take pictures," Frankie assures her, “That’s OK. I’m very photogenic." Unfazed, she continues her graceful swim.
Huppert, like the character she plays, is a famous French movie actress. Huppert made a name for herself by winning the Best Actress award at the Cannes Film Festival twice—for Claude Chabrol’s Violette Nozière (1978) and Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher (2001). She has also won two Volpic Cups for Best Actress at the Venice Film Festival, for Chabrol’s Story of Women (1988) and La Cérémonie, also known as A Judgement in Stone (1995), and a Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival as part of the cast of François Ozon’s 8 Women (2002). She received international acclaim for her performance in Paul Verhoven’s Elle (2016), which garnered her a Golden Globe Award and a Best Actress nomination at the Academy Awards. She is known for playing strong, complicated female characters that challenge conventional notions of femininity and feminine sexuality, and is especially regarded for bringing human relatability to archetypal femme fatale roles.
Frankie came about after Huppert saw Sachs’ 2014 film Love is Strange, and emailed him to tell him she loved it. They met in person a number of times over the following year, and their conversations inspired Sachs to write a movie with Huppert in mind. “For me it goes back to this idea that you’re not casting actors, you’re casting people," he says. “Transformation is not my mode when it comes to working with actors. It felt very natural to write Isabelle’s character as an actress."
Frankie, who knows that her time is limited, at times appears so physically frail that the ocean breeze might carry her away, but her star aura remains as powerful as ever. Whether it’s the opening scene at the pool or other scenes where she walks through a misty forest in heels, her presence is undeniable. Even in scenes when she is not present, her influence is acutely felt; much like the story itself, the family revolves around Frankie. Each member tries their best to keep their grief at bay for her sake, and are generally good natured when they find themselves actors in her grand scheme. Gradually, however, it becomes clear that each is dealing with their own life-changing problems.
In one scene, Frankie’s husband Jimmy (Brendan Gleeson) shakes his head and says, “You come up with all these crazy scenarios in your head. You think you can manipulate everything, don’t you?" He’s seen all this before. One of Frankie’s ulterior motives is to bring together her unlucky-in-love son Paul (Jérémie Renier) with her good friend Ilene (Marisa Tomei). Ilene is a hair and makeup artist based in New York and grew close to Frankie after working on a movie together—she says that Frankie is the only actress in all of her years working in film that she’s become real friends with. Unfortunately for Frankie, Ilene shows up with her boyfriend Gary (Greg Kinnear), a second unit DP working on some Star Wars film shooting in nearby Spain.
In another scene, Frankie and Paul have perhaps the most heated argument in the movie, which culminates in him storming off like a child, leaving his mother behind in the woods. Just as Frankie’s frustration reaches a boiling point, there comes Ilene walking down the road alone, having been separated from Gary amidst a flurry of tourists. After an emotional reunion, Ilene asks, “Do you have any idea where we are?" And Frankie responds, in exasperation, “I have no sense of direction!" She’s speaking about the fact that they’re lost in the woods, of course, but in that moment she also appears to finally accept that while she may be an exceptional actress, her senses as a “director" are much less honed.
3.Director Ira Sachs and Screenwriter Mauricio Zacharias
Director Ira Sachs is known for his intimate, nuanced portrayals of love, sexuality, gay identity, and family life. Born in Tennessee, the openly gay Sachs made his feature length debut with 1998’s The Delta, the story of a Jewish boy and an immigrant Vietnamese living in a Mississippi town trying to cope with their homosexuality. This film was also screened at the 7th annual Tokyo International Lesbian & Gay Film Festival.
Since the 2010s, he has co-written his scripts with Brazilian screenwriter Mauricio Zacharias. The pair have made three films set in New York: Keep the Lights On (2012) chronicles the relationship between a documentary filmmaker and a lawyer struggling with drug addiction, Love is Strange (2014) portrays the challenges an elderly gay couple run into after gay marriage is made legal in New York, and Little Men (2016) is the story of two teenage friends whose bond is tested against the backdrop of gentrification.
For Frankie, Sachs and Zacharias started with the idea of a family on a vacation. When Zacharias, whose mother is Portuguese, suggested Sintra as a possible location, Sachs remembered that he had vacationed there with his family as a teenager. They traveled to Portugal and spent more than a week scouting locations before returning to the U.S. and getting to work on the script. “We were then able to write it for the location, as if writing it for an actor,” Sachs says.
As a result, the geography and history of Sintra factor heavily into the story. The movie starts at the hotel pool before expanding into town streets nearby, which feature a bakery, a flower shop, and an outdoor fountain that promises success in love. Later, the characters venture into the fairy tale-like gardens and villas beyond, with a castle and a church sparking some interesting revelations. Finally, the family converges on a clifftop to take in the sunset in the final scene. In one way or another, each of the settings serves to reflect a character’s emotional state or hint at their future.
Frankie is Sachs’ first time filming abroad, but you wouldn’t know it by the way the movie effortlessly incorporates its surroundings. Sachs’s way of making films is often more associated with European or Asian art films than it is with Hollywood. His auteurist approach and movies about New York have garnered comparisons to filmmakers like Woody Allen, but while Allen’s movies are about nebbish, neurotic characters, Sachs prefers to let silences and characters’ expressions do the talking.
4.A Vicarious European Summer Vacation, Warts and All
As I wrote in the intro, family vacations are extremely stressful both in planning and execution. Movies about family vacations are usually comedies of errors, where things go increasingly off the rails until one or all of the characters reaches their limit in a dramatic and cathartic confrontation with the others. Frankie, in contrast, is a story driven not by errors but by slow conversations and subtle emotional shifts. Although Frankie herself knows her time is winding down, never once is she in a hurry to get somewhere—she lives life on her terms, and at her pace.
Although Frankie is about family taking a vacation together, the family does not actually come together until the very last scene; most of the film consists of two or three characters in conversation, attempting to deal with their own problems. Frankie’s husband Jimmy is unable to imagine a life without her and is inconsolably sad throughout, but he attempts to keep it together for her sake. Her thirtysomething son Paul is struggling to achieve emotional independence from his mother, but instead can’t help but fall back into the behavioral patterns of a child. Her friend Ilene is ambivalent about her relationship with the rather dull Gary.
If this was a lesser, more cliched film, Frankie would have summoned her family to break the news that she is dying—cue the emotional farewells and satisfying resolutions. Instead, almost all of the characters start off the film already knowing of Frankie’s illness. If anything, they are suspicious of her motives for gathering them in the first place. Frankie’s granddaughter in law Maya (Sennia Nanua) is having none of it; she declares the day her “Independence Day" and takes off for the beach alone.
Each member of Frankie’s family—and Ilene—is at a crossroads in life, but Sachs does not try to play the situation for drama. If anything, he depicts their struggles as just a natural part of life. Each time it feels as if someone is about to reach a breakthrough of some sort, the film switches its focus to another one of the characters. Unlike so many mainstream (Hollywood) films that are so dependent on momentum, this film is refreshing in the nonchalant way it unwinds its plot. It’s more about the situations and locations the characters find themselves in than it is about machinations—just like a good vacation should be. I would say it’s a “mature" look at the family vacation, but as Frankie says, “I hate that word—it’s offensive!"
It all builds up to the final shot of the film, a long-held wide shot of the family arriving at a clifftop and taking in the ocean view and the sunset. Here, both Frankie the character and Sachs as a director do something unexpected. The sunset, of course, is a metaphor for the final phase of someone’s life. And while Frankie accepts her fate, she defiantly demonstrates that she will live on her own terms. While illness is part of her life, it is not all of her life. “You’re not in a perpetual state of dying," Sachs says. “You’re actually in a perpetual state of living. You live until you die. For me the character Frankie is witness to that."
5.Epilogue
Japanese audiences will find that the cultural differences between how we think of “vacation" will greatly inform how they view Frankie.
For example, Europeans—especially the French—savor the summer as a sacred time when the entire continent agrees to put everything on pause and go on vacation. Both adults and children alike take several weeks off to travel abroad, go hiking and camping and on all sorts of experiences and adventures. It’s a period of rejuvenation that is practically required by law. And just like Frankie is the protagonist of Sachs’ film, family vacations are not about adults catering to the whims of children.
In contrast, while Americans value their time off, they are not as obsessed with the idea of a lengthy summer vacation abroad—something that is reserved for high school and college graduates looking for one last adventure before hunkering down for school or work. In fact, other than first-generation and second-generation immigrants and those on either the West or East Coast, many Americans have never even been overseas. What’s more, while many Japanese will have trouble accepting the idea of Americans as especially diligent workers, the truth of the matter is that Americans have more working days and fewer holidays than their European counterparts. In almost every scene that Ilene’s boyfriend Gary appears in, he is concerned more about work than he is about his surroundings. Even in the scenes where he talks about his relationship with Ilene, he manages to make the conversation about work. Unsurprisingly, he’s the most pragmatic out of all the characters.
For the Japanese, vacations are all about tour packages, moving around as a group, and going down the list of pre-determined itineraries. More importantly, vacations are centered on children—what they want, or what parents think will be good for them. Parents derive satisfaction from planning for their kids, and kids derive pleasure by having their parents plan things out for them. If there’s an elderly family member along for the ride, they’re treated more akin to a pet than a human being. If Frankie was about a Japanese family, the titular grandma would not be the matriarch of the family; rather, she would be made frail and rendered immobile by endless comments about “taking it easy" and how she “must be tired".
With COVID-19 throwing a wrench into people’s plans to visit home or travel for the Obon holidays, the themes of life and family in Frankie are more resonant than ever. It couldn’t be arriving in Japanese theaters at a better time. Experience Frankie’s European family vacation unfold on screen, then go home and contemplate what it means to go on vacation, what it means to spend time with family, and what it means to live.
