And If We All Lived Together?

Synopsis: Over a get-together lunch between life-long friends now in their seventies, Jean (Guy Bedos) suggests that instead of living apart they should live together. Jean’s wife Annie (Geraldine Chaplin) is reluctant, but when Claude (Claude Rich) is put into a nursing home by his son, she sees the light.

As the highly successful superannuant comedy The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel draws to the end of its theatrical season, Stéphane Robelin’s thematically-related film makes its appearance. Although being in French and less directly aimed at the funny bone will shorten the ticket office queues, And If We All Lived Together? is a well-written (by Robelin) and likeable portrait of a group of friends who band together for mutual support as they face the inevitabilities of old age. That it features a charming performance from  a 75 year-old Jane Fonda is the icing on a very presentable cake.

Although quite literally an ensemble film, Fonda is the first amongst equals (unless the fact that we know her work much better than the rest of the cast gives that impression). Speaking French impressively well and evidently having not neglected her workouts over the years she is very much the focal point of the narrative, playing a woman who has to have her act together as her husband (Pierre Richard) grows increasingly vague and she succumbs to cancer. The stoic quality which distinguished so many of her father’s performances quite uncannily emerges here and this is easily Fonda’s best performance since she came out of retirement in the mid-2000s and perhaps since Klute and They Shoot Horses, Don't They? at the turn of the 1960s.

Although bringing home some of the realities of aging, Robelin takes a sotto voce approach to the subject, and, as we are well-accustomed to with French films, things are never less than graciously tasteful (well except for Jeanne’s hot pink coffin). The characters are well-drawn and the performances work together seemingly effortlessly as the old codgers bump up against each other, Robelin coming up with the device of a young PhD student (Daniel Brühl) studying the elderly in order to air some of the issues, particularly sexual ones.

Although there are a few too many nubile breasts on display, overall And If We All Lived Together? balances its various elements in a gently pleasing way and whilst light in tone it presents some food for thought, at least if you’re in, or a stone's throw away from, your twilight years.

 

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