Any film that features both Noemie Lvovsky AND Dominic Pinon is an automatic five just for their names on the credits, now throw in Kristen Scott Thomas and add another couple of points. A half-decent script would have boosted it even further but you can't have everything. I'm guessing that there's something of an ego trip in the background. Israel Horowitz wrote a play I haven't heard of but was probably a three-hander in one set. With one fifty minute documentary a dozen years old he had eyes to adapt it for the screen and direct it himself. Another guess is that somehow he persuaded Maggie Smith, Kevin Kline and Kristen Scott Thomas to come aboard and then, of course, it financed itself. It's a nothing story in which a burnt-out deadbeat (Kline) who hasn't got change of a match, suddenly inherits a substantial apartment in the Marais, turns up to sell it and light out for Acapulco only to discover 92 year old Maggie Smith as a permanent fixture and as if that weren't enough she has a daughter, Kristen Scott Thomas the same age as Kline. Sartre had already written this and called it Huis Clos but heigh ho there's probably more mileage in it if we don't look too closely. Right off it needs to be said that Scott Thomas is beyond magnificent whilst her co-stars have to settle for magnificent. Apparently someone told Horowitz that when you adapt a stage play for the screen it's permitted to 'open it out' and include outdoor scenes that could not have been seen in a theatre. I'm guessing that this didn't sit too well with him because he does his damnedest to make Paris look like Altoona on a slow Thursday. He fails miserably of course, as anyone who tried it would but it was a bonehead play.
Review of My Old Lady
