At the first glance, they (Dario Argento, Francoise Lebrun) are a very ordinary elderly couple, she's a retired psychiatrist, he's a film critic writing on a book about the correlation of film and dreams, and they have their daily routines, and while they sometimes seem a little cold towards one another, they seem to make a good team - until she gets lost in a supermarket and he has to go fetch her. And it turns out, this isn't the first time something like this has happened, she's suffering from Alzheimer's, and it seems to be worsening by the day. Eventually, things get so bad he has to call their son Stéphane (Alex Lutz), but Stéphane can't help much either as he has problems of his own, which include drug abuse. And his parents refuse to give up their apartment and move to a home for assisted living, something she'd be in bad need of. So our elderly coulple continues to try to make things work, but things only deteriorate, which includes her flushing down his manuscript in the toilet or turning on the gas and almost killing them both. And then things come to a head when he has a heart attack ...

Shot almost entirely split screen, this technique is nevertheless not used for spectacle's sake but as the center of its technique of storytelling, which actually tells its story in a very unexcited, pretty much slice-of-life way and gets its narrative tension much more out of things unsaid, out of the story's subtext. And that works very well most of the time, only towards the end, when the (entirely improvised) dialogue, especially between Stéphane and his father, repeats things a bit too often, the story starts to drag a bit, and likewise the very last scenes of a funeral are spelling things out a bit too clearly that were beautifully left in the dark earlier on. But that said, the film might need a little patience, but is still worth a watch, also because of beautiful and very natural performances by all three leads.

review © by Mike Haberfelner

 

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