French Girl (James A. Woods, Nicolas Wright, 2024): Canada

Reviewed by Luca Rijkhoff. Viewed at Santa Barbara International Film Festival 2024

French Girl is a bilingual movie directed and written by James A. Woods and Nicolas Wright. Their sense of humor and enthusiasm is projected into this movie and makes it more into a comedy than a romance. Both of them are Canadian, so they really stayed close to home. Almost the entire movie takes place in Quebec City, and half of the dialogue is French. Multiple big actors star in this movie, such as Zach Braff (Scrubs, A Good Person and Obi-Wan Kenobi) and Vanessa Hudgens (High School Musical, The Princess Switch and Journey 2).

The movie starts in Brooklyn, New York, where English teacher Gordon Kinski (Zach Braff) and his girlfriend Sophie Tremblay (Evelyne Brochu) live. Sophie is originally from Quebec City, Canada, and when her ex-girlfriend (Vanessa Hudgens) comes to New York to offer her a job opportunity at her Michelin star restaurant, Gordon and Sophie both fly to Quebec and stay at the Tremblay’s family farm. Gordon tries to impress his girlfriend’s family, but he is a little clumsy and portrayed as a ‘pussy’, like his dad (William Fichtner) describes him. We can see this clearly in multiple scenes, like the opening scene where he burns all the food he tried to make for breakfast, or when he arrives in Quebec City and accidentally kisses Sophie’s grandmother. His character gave a comedic twist to the movie without making it to stereotypical.

I think this movie differs from ‘normal’ rom-coms, because the focus is less on the relationship between the main characters but more on Gordon forming a relationship with his family-in-law. Sophie is portrayed as bisexual, since she has an ex-girlfriend. This doesn’t get mentioned in the movie at all, and it’s just very casually shown. This makes it more modern and gives a more realistic idea. What also makes this movie so special, is that it’s equally divided between English and French. Quebec is a French speaking part in Canada, but the main character is from the United States. Making a bilingual movie is a big risk, even more when it’s comedy, because you don’t know how the joke will land if the audience don’t speak the language. They did a fair job in this and the French dialogue made it way more realistic and added charism to the story.

I really liked this movie, because it was not so cheesy like a lot of rom-coms can be, and it was also really original without too much clichés. The cinematography was nothing special, but it was well done and there were a lot of shots on the city itself, which created a beautiful view about the environment the story took place in, and they didn’t only show the city, but also the countryside and the farms, in a kind of traditional way. Sophie’s father is a butcher and in one scene they go out hunting. After seeing the movie, the directors, producers and a few actors came out to talk about the movie and they explained a lot about how they shot some scenes and why, which made me understand the story even more. Overall, this movie was better than I expected and I would advise people to go see it when it comes out in March, I really think the directors need recognition for this work.