My Old Lady (2014)
Cast includes: Kevin Kline (A Fish Called Wanda), Maggie Smith (Downton Abbey), Kristin Scott Thomas (Gosford Park), Dominique Pinon (A Very Long Engagement)
Writer/Director: Israel Horovitz (New York, I love You)
Genre: Comedy | Drama (107 minutes)
This must be it… 13 Rue Payenne in the Marais section of Paris. Mathias Gold (“My friends called me Jim… back when I had friends.”) knocks. The door isn’t locked. He wonders in… “Bonjour (American accent), hello, bonjour, hello, nobody home?” The old lady was napping, but after a rough beginning, they make their introductions. She’s Mme Girard, the “tenant.” She shows Mathias around… not upstairs… she doesn’t do stairs anymore… oh my, the salon is lovely with a beautiful garden view. “In its time we had wonderful parties in the garden.” “The garden is part of the property?” exclaims Mathias. “It must be worth a fortune!” “You look remarkably like your father,” Mme Girard comments when Mathias comes back from taking iPhone photos of the garden and the house. Obviously, he’s planning to sell the house, which he’s just inherited from his father… but not so fast!
There’s the “situation,” which obviously Mathias doesn’t know about. Mme Girard is a viager (vee-A-jay)… she comes with the property… in a contract, also called “viager.” When she sold the house to Mathias’s father many years ago, he agreed to pay her a fee to stay there… €2,400 a month for life. Well! Isn’t that just like the old man! “He left me some books, a watch and this house.” “To WHOM did he leave the rest?” (Mme Girard is an English teacher, and she never mixes up who and whom.) “Charity. He apparently didn’t feel comfortable leaving it to me… I’ve just spent my last cent to get here,” he says. “Apparently, I not only own an apartment, I own you!” This is true… and Mme Girard points out that he is also going to have to pay her €2,400 at the end of the month. “How old are you?” he asks. She says she’s 90… Mathias wonders how long until she dies. “How did you get to be… 60ish… with so little to show for it?” Mme Girard asks… having lost all interest in subtly. “Fifty-seven and a few months,” he corrects her. “Well, there were the 3 divorces… one for each of my unpublished novels.” Because he has no place to go, Mme Girard agrees to let him stay in one of the upstairs rooms for now… “Dinner is at 8:00 sharp!”
Furthermore, Mme Girard warns Mathias against trying to commit suicide by jumping into the Seine… “You’ll probably just catch a head cold.” With Maggie Smith as Mme Girard and Kevin Kline as Mathias, it’s easy to get swept away by the excellent performances… but there’s more. The next morning, Mathias finds out that Mme Girard’s daughter Chloé (Kristin Scott Thomas) also lives in the house. Last night, Mathias thought the old lady was a problem. Chloé makes the old lady seem like an ally. My Old Lady was a stage play, also by Israel Horovitz, before it was a movie. At times it still feels a bit like a play, but the movie has the advantage of the wonderful Paris footage. As charming as it is, this isn’t just about real estate… at a certain point, we discover there is a backstory that just won’t stay in the background. “Just when you think things are really, really bad, they get terrible!” says Mathias. But for us in the audience, watching Mathias navigate this surprising viager situation is really, really fun.
4 popped kernels
Inheriting a Paris apartment with a 90-year-old tenant
Popcorn Profile
Audience: Grown-ups
Gender Style: Neutral
Distribution: Art House
Mood: Upbeat
Tempo: Cruises Comfortably
Visual Style: Nicely Varnished Realism
Nutshell: Inheriting a Paris apartment
Language: True to life
Social Significance: Pure Entertainment
