Sunday Review: My Old Lady

Adultery, viager, and their discontents

By Jonathan Price

The French are reputed to say, perhaps thinking of Madame Bovary, that “without adultery there is no novel.” And of course adultery, both practical and literary, is not limited to the French. But there is a French setting for this film My Old Lady (2014) about, among other things, adultery. Israel Horowitz, after 18 years, has made a filmed version of his play, and taken it from its apartment confines and entrances and exits out onto the streets of Paris. And his work’s take on adultery is neither romantic nor particularly sympathetic and, in that way, is refreshing without quite being puritanical.
    Mathias “Jim” Gold (Kevin Kline) is shown tentatively and a bit awkwardly moving about Paris looking for an address, which proves to be in the newly fashionable Marais district. He enters an attractive, older building; when no one responds to his ring, he searches the rooms on several floors until he eventually finds Mathilde Girard, an old woman played by Maggie Smith, almost cowering in a corner apartment. As the American explains to the British resident of the French building, he has newly inherited the property, the only asset his father left him after dying. But the rental is actually a viager. This derives from the arcane, remarkable, and nearly whimsical French practice explained several times and in several ways in the film – a kind of reverse mortgage, to assure aging residents of both income and domicile, and to offer investors and prospective home owners a potential bargain (if the resident dies earlier rather than later); but essentially it is a kind of lottery based on age and mortality estimates and human (dis)honesty, as many aging residents disguise their age and infirmity in order to secure better terms.
    All is not what it seems, and neither character in this initial encounter can be fully trusted. Jim will use his own devices to sustain his economic viability – mostly disreputable and deplorable. We also discover that the “tenant” harbors a subtenant, Chloe (Kristin Scott Thomas), Mathilde’s resident daughter.

These opening complications set the stage for the film’s two themes: the viager, the one we think we don’t understand; and the adultery, the one we think we do. Thomas has been in several classic films with adultery themes, though she has made many other genres: she is the dying adulterous lover in The English Patient, worth sacrificing a civilization for; in The Horse Whisperer her character falls in love with, but never consummates the adulterous attraction to the horse whisperer who helps to rescue her daughter from emotional and physical pain. In Random Hearts, she is, along with Harrison Ford, a mutual victim of adultery after the adultery is discovered following the simultaneous deaths of their spouses.
    In My Old Lady, Chloe eventually reveals to Jim that she was present when her mother had clandestine meetings with his father, and that she was complicit in the deception her mother practiced on her own father. Matthias also, apparently observing no social limits in his quest to retake the viager property, stalks Chloe and discovers she is having an affair with a married colleague. He blackmails her, threatening discovery. His relationship with Chloe seems adversarial and tense, but they are actually sharing, since they, as their discussions reveal, are both victims of adultery, even though Mathilde, the sole living participant in the adultery, remembers it with intensity and affection, regarding it as a high point in her life.

The attractions of adultery, its historic literary and popular appeal, are evident in fictions as disparate as The Scarlet Letter, The English Patient, Anna Karenina, and The Great Gatsby, to mention but a few in a long tradition. These fictions generally offer great sympathy and understanding for the lovers, almost universal distaste for the absent mates, and a variety of climaxes. Virtually all these literary and cinematic adulteries provide beautiful settings for their affairs, as does My Old Lady with Paris: among others, there are some beautiful shots of Jim walking lonely by the Seine and encountering a woman singing opera, with whom he performs a duet. But despite its romantic setting, the film explores and implies the suffering adultery has caused in absent mates and offspring.

    Mathilde’s self-deception is confronted in a variety of ways. She had always thought that Jim’s mother was unaware or at least untouched by the adultery,which occurred in a foreign land, and that she had died after an illness. But the film reveals Jim’s and his mother’s troubled family history, seen as a result of his father’s infidelity. The film’s ending revelation undercuts its Parisian-beautiful-romantic-nostalgic view of adultery. It strikes Mathilde like a powerful blow. It brings Chloe and Jim close enough together that they become lovers. In fact the film is about the loneliness of the three central characters, who have lived alone for long parts of their lives and, despite personal charm and wit and intelligence, are clearly unhappy. In the grand tradition of American movie happy endings, the dilemmas of both the viager and the pain of loneliness are solved by Jim and Chloe’s love affair and Mathilde’s offer of to forgive rent and provide Jim a place to stay. It’s a bit too neat, given the strong emotions the imaginative plot has set in play: homeless, unemployed recovering alcoholics rarely find such an easy solution to their problems.
    Nevertheless My Old Lady offers key coy, comic, and powerful performances by its three principals. Comedy, tragedy, and pathos are intermixed, as when we hear a gun explode in Jim’s upstairs room and think he has committed suicide in alcoholic stupor, but has only shot a stuffed boar, relic of Chloe’s adulterous, absent father.

Copyright © 2014 by Jonathan Price