The last time Kevin Kline journeyed to France on film, he played a French jewel thief who duped Meg Ryan into committing a crime in “French Kiss.” In “My Old Lady” he’s back in the City of Light but this time around he’s a desperate, down-on-his luck New Yorker who inherits an apartment from his late father, only to find it comes with strings.
Kline is Mathias Gold who travels to Paris in the hope of selling his estranged father’s huge and valuable apartment. He’s broke and has three ex-wives to go along with the three novels he wrote and never published. When he arrives his lack of proficiency in French isn’t his only problem. An elderly English woman, Mathilde Girard (Maggie Smith) lives in the apartment with her daughter Chloé (Kristin Scott Thomas). The apartment is a “viager,” and according to French real estate laws, because Mathilde has possession of the place Gold must pay her a “rent” of 2400 euros a month until she dies. If he defaults, she keeps the flat. “I own this apartment and I also own you,” he says. As tensions run high the old lady makes a startling revelation. “Your father and I were lovers since I was twenty-nine,” she says. “If you want to know for whom you are named, you are named for me. I am Mathilde, you are Mathias.”
“My Old Lady” is the kind of film that is enhanced by its performances. What begins as a fish out of water story about real estate and desperation slowly becomes a character study. It’s very theatrical, which makes sense given playwright-turned-film-director Israel Horowitz’s background, but the stage-bound feel doesn’t take away from the rawness of the emotions or the snappiness of the dialogue. By turns comedic, by turns tragic, “My Old Lady’s” carefully crafted acting earns it a recommend.
There is no shortage of John Lennon on celluloid. There are five official Beatles movies, documentaries like “The U.S. vs. John Lennon,” a 2006 movie that focuses on Lennon’s transformation from musician into antiwar activist, and even experimental short films like the John and Yoko shorts like “Two Virgins” and “Apotheosis.” He’s been portrayed by everyone from Paul Rudd (in “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story”) to Monty Python’s Eric Idle but rarely has any actor captured both Lennon’s rebelliousness and vulnerability as Aaron Johnson does in “Nowhere Boy.”
The coming-of-age-story of one of the most famous people of the twentieth century, “Nowhere Boy” examines Lennon’s relationship with his estranged mother Julia (Anne-Marie Duff) and his Aunt Mimi (Kristin Scott Thomas), the woman who raised him. For the first time on film we see the effect the combustible combination of women had on his life. His mother’s ready! steady! go! lifestyle helping to form his rock ‘n’ roll side, while Aunt Mimi’s more slow and steady influence brought out John’s sensitive, artistic side.
“Nowhere Boy” is a fascinating character study that reveals the formative years of a complicated man. Aaron Johnson, who was eighteen at the time, succeeds because he doesn’t try to imitate Lennon, instead he plays a young, confused man who is on the cusp of growing up. Sure, the distinctive Liverpool accent is there as are the right period details, but it’s what is beyond those crutches that make this performance, as they said in “Yellow Submarine,” “a tickle of joy on the belly the universe.”
First time director Sam Taylor-Wood gets the muddled mix of excitement, testosterone and disappointment Lennon felt on an almost daily basis just right, and in the process has made one of the best Beatle bios to date.
Easy Virtue, the new film from The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert director Stephan Elliott, is a comedy-of-manners loosely based on a Noël Coward play of the same name. Originally filmed as a silent movie in 1928 by Alfred Hitchcock, the new version is anything but quiet with the British members of the cast—Colin Firth, Kristin Scott Thomas and Narnia’s Ben Barnes—expertly lobbing frothy dialogue too and fro. It’s up to the lone above-the-title American star Jessica Biel, not to get lost in the crossfire.
Biel is Larita, a brash American widow who marries John Whittaker (Barnes), a wealthy Brit after a brief romance in the south of France. When John brings home his new wife, or the “gold-digger from the land of opportunists” as she is seen by his mother (Kristen Scott Thomas), a class war erupts between the spirited Larita and stiff upper lipped Whittakers.
Easy Virtue is the latest big release from Ealing Studios. For over 100 years the British studio has been synonymous with quality comedy, particularly during their 1940s and 50s heyday when they produced classics like Passport to Pimlico, Kind Hearts and Coronets and The Ladykillers. Like its predecessors Easy Virtue has its virtues—it’s a quality production, elegantly directed and, for the most part, nicely acted, but a classic it’s not. I doubt it’ll ever sit on the shelf next to any of the studio’s better known titles.
It’s a hard movie to hate, but an even harder one to love. While it has its moments—the 1970s disco hit Car Wash is nicely adapted and snuck into the soundtrack as a jaunty British ragtime tune, butler Furber is played with deadpan perfection by Kris Marshall and much attention has been paid to the period sets and costumes—it’s a little too frivolous too make much of an impression.
It is worth a look to see Kristin Scott Thomas take standard mother-in-law joke of a role and bring it to vibrant, acidic life or Colin Firth bang off one-liners with the ease of drawing room comedy veteran but while I know many people who wouldn’t mind watching Jessica Biel for 90 minutes she isn’t one of the movie’s stronger elements.
In recent years Biel has worked very hard to break out of the model turned actress mold and take on increasingly challenging roles, and while Easy Virtue is a step forward toward her goal, she’s still a few feet away from the finish line. Witty lines that fall trippingly off the tongues of the Brits in the cast sound flat and clunky in Biel’s delivery and a scene with a dog, a pillow and an unfortunate accident proves that light comedy is not her forte.
Easy Virtue isn’t a terrible film, it’s just not very memorable.
Near the end of “Sarah’s Key” star Kristin Scott Thomas says, “When a story is told, it is not forgotten.” The story she’s referring to is the Vel’ d’Hiv roundup, a 1942 mass arrest of Jews in Paris by the French police. To tell the tale “Sarah’s Key” jumps between past and present.
Based on Tatiana De Rosnay’s international best-seller, Scott Thomas plays Julie, an American writer in Paris working on an article about the little known incident which saw ten thousand Jews—including 10-year-old Sarah Starzynski (Mélusine Mayance) and her parents—ripped from their homes and sent to internment camps. While researching the story she finds a connection between her French in-laws and the Starzynski family.
Overlooked on its theatrical release “Sarah’s Key” is getting a well deserved second life on DVD. Although it has a tendency to dip into melodrama from time to time the movie’s story of survival and guilt is buoyed by two remarkable performances.
Scott Thomas is at the center of the movie and delivers a beautifully restrained and natural performance as a woman in an unhappy marriage but it is Mélusine Mayance as young Sarah that brings fire to the movie. Her take on a young girl who escapes from a concentration camp humanizes an unimaginable atrocity.
“Sarah’s Key” is a tearjerker that peters out in its final third, but is nonetheless a potent story of survival.
