In this romantic comedy featuring Zach Braff and Vanessa Hudgens, a New York man heads to Quebec City with his French Canadian girlfriend. Shenanigans ensue.
“French Girl” is a love triangle farce that’s mostly set in Quebec City but takes place on Planet Rom-com where bipedal characters act out in ways that rarely resemble human behavior.
In New York, a middle school teacher named Gordon (Zach Braff) yearns to measure up to his girlfriend, Sophie (Evelyne Brochu), a French Canadian chef and the kind of aspirational Francophile ingénue who, within the film’s first minutes, roams a farmers market in a print dress, blonde curls tumbling down to her straw basket of fresh produce. (What, no baguette?)
Enter Sophie’s ex, Ruby (Vanessa Hudgens), a name-dropping celebrity restaurateur who engineers a ploy that brings all three past and present lovers up to Canada for a stomach-churning visit with Sophie’s noisy, knife-wielding, octagon-brawling family. Gordon is immediately attacked by a swan; worse, Ruby renders him to blubber as skillfully as if he were a roasted poulet.
The filmmakers James A. Woods and Nicolas Wright push their script dangerously close to parody. But there are at least a dozen good zingers in here, particularly a three-part punchline from Alex Woods as a snobbish food critic that kicks off with, “Have you ever seen an emaciated dolphin?” The trouble is, none of the performances are on the same wavelength: Hudgens is an outrageously hilarious monster; Brochu, an earnest heroine; and the increasingly unhinged Braff tries too hard to be empathetic. The more he wants us to sympathize with his hapless character, the more unforgivable Gordon’s actions feel. By the climax, Gordon should be in relationship and criminal jail. And no amount of je suis désolés will make the ending taste sweeter than a poisoned mint at the end of a strange meal.
French Girl
Rated R for language and steamy sexual references. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. In theaters.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
