Et si on vivait tous ensemble? (2012)
Directed by Stéphane Robelin

Film Review

In an era that has become pathologically obsessed with youth it is refreshing to come across a film that dares to deflect our attention to one reality of life that we seem to be finding harder to face up to, namely the prospect of growing old and how we should spend our declining years.  For his second feature director Stéphane Robelin offers a bittersweet yet true-to-life comedy in which five sprightly septuagenarians come up with an imaginative alternative to the terror of the retirement home: a bourgeois equivalent to the kind of hippy commune they may well have belonged to in their youth.  With a good-looking young live-in nurse to look after them (and supply Viagra for those who need it), it looks as if these enterprising oldsters have hit on the perfect solution to their accommodation and personal needs - until the bonds of friendship start to fray and several embarrassing skeletons begin popping out of the woodwork...

Et si on vivait tous ensemble? isn't perhaps the most original or subtle of comedies but it does provide a thoughtful and thought-provoking meditation on that one phase of our lives that, as the film rightly points out, we never get round to planning for.  We plan for our families, our careers, our retirement, even our funerals.  But the one thing we overlook is those last few years of life that are left to us, which is when we are likely to end up at the tender mercies of others - well-meaning relatives or, worse, the state.  Getting together with a group of like-minded friends in the same age-bracket and setting-up a commune is as good a solution as any other, and the idea may well catch on after this film.  And who wouldn't wish to join a commune that lists Jane Fonda (a.k.a. Barbarella) as one of its members?

Just how Stéphane Robelin was able to cajole a cinematic icon of Fonda's standing into playing a decaying 70-something in a modest French comedy that will probably never be seen in her own country is anyone's guess but the actress deserves credit for doing so.  The same goes for another cinematic diva, Géraldine Chaplin, who, like Fonda, has only enjoyed a passing acquaintance with French cinema in the course of a busy career.  To French audiences, the other three grey-haired principals are just as familiar and just as fondly loved: Pierre Richard, Guy Bedos and Claude Rich.  It's an almost miraculous ensemble but what is most remarkable about each of these acting legends is how ordinary and down-to-earth they appear in this film.  Fonda has seldom given a performance that is so heart-breakingly authentic and her four co-stars are just as convincing, barely faint echoes of their former blazing screen personas.  Praise is also owed to the sixth member of this improbable ensemble, the talented German actor Daniel Brühl, star of such films as Good Bye Lenin! (2003) and Inglourious Basterds (2009).  Brühl plays a cute ethnology student who is hired as a private nurse-cum-peacemaker for the five fractious wrinklies, and clearly gets more than he bargained for.

The sex lives of the over-seventies is not something that gets much of an airing in any medium, even in these liberated times - perhaps because no one believes such a thing exists - but this is one red hot taboo that Robelin isn't willing to sidestep in his film.  This is perhaps the most daring ingredient of Et si on vivait tous ensemble?, and the source of a rich vein of humour that its author mines pretty ruthlessly (hence the over-extended run of Viagra gags).  How readily we identify with Brühl's obvious embarrassment as Fonda happily talks about her masturbatory fantasies (gulp) but it is hard not to be moved by the penetrating honesty with which the film tackles this most sensitive of subjects.

The same applies equally to the allusions to death and dying, the hulking great mastodon in the room that no one can ignore for long.  With two of the main characters afflicted with life-threatening conditions and one gradually succumbing to senility, the grim realties of growing old are never far from sight.  Yet it is the proximity of death that gives the protagonists a renewed zest for living and makes them appear as if they are enjoying a second adolescence.  There's perhaps some truth in the saying that the last drops of a good bottle of wine are always the sweetest.  Robelin's film may run a little short in tact and profundity, but it strikes a chord and achieves what it intended, which is to get us to contemplate the uncontemplatable, with a wry but tender smile.

Film Synopsis

Annie, Jean, Claude, Albert and Jeanne have been firm friends for more than forty years.  They have each lived full and happy lives, but when their memories begin to falter and the prospect of moving into a retirement home rears its ugly head, they decide to take a stand against convention.  Not for them the prospect of fading away in miserable anonymity.  They will live together and share their declining years, come what may.  After all, life only begins at 75!