CinemaSerf

I wish someone would have left me an apartment in Paris's Marais district. A lively and vibrant area of the city with some gorgeous old architecture. I might not have been so enamoured, however, if I'd been left a ninety-two year old woman as a lodger to whom I had to pay €2,400 per month too! That's the viager. An ancient bit of common law that enables someone to effect a sort of sale and leaseback arrangement that entitles them to live in, and collect rent from, an house they've already sold! Clever, eh? Who better to portray such a crafty old woman than Dame Maggie Smith, and her "Mathilde" is more than ready for the visiting heir to the property "Mathias/Jim" (Kevin Kline) when he comes to claim his inheritance. He's perplexed, to put it mildly, and that only gets worse when he meets her daughter "Chloé" (Kristen Scott-Thomas) who's convinced he's evil incarnate. He hasn't a word of French and is completely at the mercy of these two women - so he'd better get his act together before they end up owning his shoes too. This starts off really quite strongly with the three characters bouncing nicely off each other with a sort of gentle menace emanating from Dame Maggie and a more vitriolic one from Scott-Thomas as poor Kline goes from hapless to helpless in half an hour. Thereafter, though, it starts to run too much to sentiment and that sparky element becomes subsumed in too much familial clutter. It all becomes a little too contrived, soapy, and the writing just runs out of steam. It's nicely shot, showing off the ordinary streets of Paris and it's characters, and at times is really quite fun to see them spatting, but in the end isn't quite the sum of it's parts.