TIFF 2014 Review: 'My Old Lady'

If Magic in the Moonlight didn’t fulfill your yearly Woody Allen gift, then allow me to offer Israel Horovitz’s My Old Lady. It has witty banter. It has formidable actors (Kevin Kline, Maggie Smith and Kristin Scott Thomas). It has a European setting. It exposes a rather obscure, and to Americans, a potentially ridiculous sounding, type of housing contract in France. It is one part comedy and one part Tennessee Williams family tragedy. It also directly confronts potential incest.

Who is Israel Horovitz? A 75-year old playwright who’s written approximately 70 plays and makes his directorial debut, here, adapting his 2002 play. Kline plays a Mathias Gold, a man who’s approaching 60 and who has spent all that he has to get to Paris and attempt to sell an apartment that his father left him in his will. There is a problem, though. His relator does not speak very good English (cue memories of Javier Bardem pleading with Penelope Cruz in Vicky Cristina Barcelona to “speak English!”) and Mathias is unaware of a contract that his father had with the tenant, Mathilde (Smith), who is still boarding there. The French term is “viager“, which is, an investment gamble wherein — for a below market value purchase price — the buyer will take ownership when the current owner dies. Mathias’ father purchased the apartment in this fashion 40 years ago. Mathilde is now 92 and in very good health (she attributes it to her nightly glass of perfectly aged wine; she lies and says she’s 90 in old lady vanity).

Mathilde will allow him to stay, if he pays rent. Mathias has nowhere else he can go so he tries to come up with rent. But he is proactive. The old lady let it slip that she’s not been able to make it upstairs in years, so Mathias starts selling antiques from her dead husband’s upstairs bedroom. And he gets the house appraised by a local relator (Dominique Pinon) via cell phone photos that Mathias took of the double-level apartment with a goldmine of a backyard in the heart of Paris. Mathias can’t make calls on the cell phone. Its long been turned off. He also checks in with Mathilde’s doctor to appraise her health.

This section of My Old Lady works very well because Kline doesn’t play Mathias as a wholly deplorable person. Instead, Kline (and Horovitz) treat him as desperate man who sees the situation as just one more way that his father has fucked him over in life. And Mathias is a type of character — a penniless near-retiree with three failed marriages, stuck in Paris — that I’ve never seen before. We’ve seen old curmudgeons who learn to soften up many times in film, but not an older, lonely failure such as this.

Yes, stealing from an old woman and hoping for her death is the comedy. And it is funny. But Mathilde isn’t without a bite, either. She asks Mathias, “how could someone be 59 and never have achieved anything?” over their first dinner together. After he’s agreed to, somehow, pay his room and board. In what he thought was his own apartment.

Mathias does soften a little. But only after he falls of the wagon and begins stealing wine from Mathilde after she confesses that she had a lengthy affair with his father. This opens the Tennessee Williams/serious Woody Allen story-territory that occupies the second-half of the film. My Old Lady shifts to family secrets. Drunken shouting matches and discussions of morality. In which Mathilde’s daughter, Chloe (Scott Thomas) also becomes involved. The black comedy is tossed into the Seine River, heated arguments take place. The venting is well-written but repetitive, but once the narrative revelations start to render Smith (who gives a delightfully dually likable/detestable turn) clawless, both the fun and drama is drained.

But, for this critic, though it begins stumbling at the end of the second act, this European-set end-of-rope comedy is far more enjoyable than Allen’s most recent European going-through-the-motions romance. Horovitz gifts us an oddball, old-world approach to housing and the finest performance from Kline in years.