My Old Lady
Directed By: Israel Horovitz
Cast: Maggie Smith, Kevin Kline, Kristen Scott-Thomas, Dominique Pinon, Stephane Freiss, Noemie Lvovsky, Stephane De Groodt
Rating: (M)
Two and a half stars (out of five)
Reprising mannerisms that made Otto such a hit in A Fish Called Wanda, Kevin Kline plays Mathias, a broke New Yorker who arrives in Paris with the goal of selling his inheritance.
Having been left a sizeable apartment in an expensive location, he is swept up in his financial windfall until he discovers that he isn't alone in the apartment.
Living in the apartment are Mathilde (Maggie Smith) and her daughter Chloe (Kristen Scott-Thomas).
Unknown to Mathias, the apartment is tied up in a ''viager'', a French system for buying and selling apartments, which means Mathilde can live in the house until she dies, and also be paid regular cash instalments for the rest of her life.
On discovering this, and the fact that he has no finances, Mathias takes heart that Mathilde is 90 and surely can't survive for too long.
This then is a cue for several half-baked plans to liquidate his only asset and some heavily orchestrated interplay between Kline, Smith and Scott-Thomas.
Flirting around the fact that the whole charade is staged in France, but most of the dialogue is in English, Horovitz has left quite a few details in the script that are barely believable.
All this does is give the viewer even less reason to engage with the ham-fisted human emotions in a film which cannot decide quite what it is.
- Mark Orton
