My New Friends (2024) Movie Drinking Game
Take a Drink: for every mention or hint of social unrest
Take a Drink: whenever the voiceover kicks in
Take a Drink: for every favor Huppert does for her neighbors
Do a Shot: whenever that favor crosses a line
Do a Shot: sweet Obama shirt
By: Henry J. Fromage (Three Beers) –
You’re not mistaken if you think you’re seeing Isabelle Huppert everywhere these days. It seems like she’s coming after Samuel L. Jackson’s crown, appearing in arthouse films of every size at an impressive rate.
Here she plays a police forensics expert who finds herself crossing social lines as she befriends a family of young artists and activists who’ve moved in next door.
A Toast
This probably goes without saying, but Isabelle Huppert is great as always. She embodies a woman who’s shrunken her social circle to retreat from the pain of her beloved husband’s death, but who finds a spark that she’s been long missing in these very different kind of people she encounters next door.
Director André Téchiné has been a standard on the French arthouse scene for awhile now and directs with a polished, experienced hand. His cast’s diversity reflects the diversity of France, and through them he comments on the rapidly (although long in progress) changing dynamics of an internationalized society in his home country.
Beer Two
Huppert’s constant voiceover jars at first, and that doesn’t really ever get better. It feels unnecessary, a shortcut that, if employed by a lesser filmmaker, would usually be called lazy, or at least cliche.
Beer Three
I don’t know if I buy some of the conflict. “You’re my super nice neighbor who’s done everything for me, but also you’re a dirty cop!” The attempt to draw conflict out of black and white differences when you’ve spent the whole film establishing why those lines are arbitrary and blurred at best doesn’t work for me. Not every movie needs a end of second act falling out between your characters.
Verdict
My New Friends is an inoffensive, not very challenging story of crossing cultural lines in a France that seems as politicized and polarized as anywhere these days.
