Horovitz: My Old Lady (2014)

From a distance, My Old Lady looks like comfort cinema. For one thing, it features Maggie Smith, Kevin Kline and Kristin Scott Thomas in lead roles. For another thing, it’s set in Paris. On top of that, the narrative is driven by a peculiarity of French real estate law – the viager clause – that results in Kline’s character, Matthias Gold, inheriting Francoise Girard (Smith) and her daughter Chloe (Thomas) along with a luxuriously appointed apartment that’s left to him in his father’s will, in a kind of upstairs-downstairs sitcom waiting to happen. Finally, and despite Horovitz’s pedigree in writing for the screen, it’s all overlaid with a comforting, slightly creaky staginess that initially seems too fragile or old-fashioned to let anything too drastic or violent intrude. However, that just makes it all the more surprising when it devolves into a harrowing chamber drama, especially since Horovitz never quite discards the comforting film it might have been, or allows the comic potential to get lost in all the arguments and accusations. Maggie Smith, in particular, puts in a performance that subtly and indisiously undoes all the  grandmotherly wisdom she’s accrued over the last twenty years, while Kevin Kline and Kristin Scott Thomas are quite astonishing as a pair of baby boomers who are still tortured by their parents, still desperate to define themselves against the pre-war generation. That might sound oppressive, and it occasionally is, but it’s only because Horovitz seems to be rebelling against what passes for affirmation in cinema made for seniors these days. Affirming the right of older people to be tortured by the past, rather than just collapsed indiscriminately into it by a younger generation searching for something to define their own angst against, he respects his senior characters enough to fight for their futures, and there’s something quite bracing about that, even if it perpetually displaces the feel-good film that’s just around each perfectly appointed Parisian corner.