In Theaters

Francine

Movie Details

  • Genre: Drama
  • Running Time: 74 min.
  • Directors: Brian M. Cassidy, Melanie Shatzky
  • Cast: Melissa Leo, Keith Leonard, Victoria Charkut
  • Writers: Brian M. Cassidy, Melanie Shatzky

Simultaneously withholding and smothering, Francine, about a woman just released from prison, provides title-role-starring Melissa Leo another opportunity, after Frozen River and The Fighter, to play economic-margins dress-up. Her crime or length of time behind bars never specified, Francine settles into a lean-to somewhere in the Hudson Valley and drifts through a series of jobs, most of which involve animal care. Human interaction proves more difficult, unless it involves bending over in the bathroom on an impromptu break from her cocktail-waitressing shift at the racetrack. Yet Francine's preference for the company of quadrupeds quickly develops into pathology, as her shack is soon overrun with cats and dogs and their excrement--at which point Brian M. Cassidy and Melanie Shatzky's debut feature (they have made two documentaries before this) reveals itself to be a project of few interesting ideas. Unlike, say, Barbara Loden’s Wanda (1970), whose female drifter from bleakest Pennsylvania coal country makes a series of bad decisions that aren’t independent-filmmaking semaphore for abjection, Francine eventually abandons its opacity for queasy-making cruelty.

Melissa Anderson
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