Jane Fonda

JANE FONDA IN FIVE ACTS: self-assessment and self-revelation

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Jane Fonda appears in JANE FONDA IN FIVE ACTS by Susan Lacy, an official selection of the Documentary Premieres program at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute | photo courtesy of Everett Collection.

HBO is airing a remarkable biodoc of Jane Fonda, Jane Fonda in Five Acts.  It turns the talking head documentary on its, well, talking head, because the main narrator/commentator on Jane Fonda’s life is Jane Fonda herself.  She reveals the most personal, even intimate, experiences and feelings; you could tag this as “extremely personally revealing” or even as “oversharing”.  either way, I found it irresistible.

The theme is that Fonda’s life was shaped, in phases, by (or to reflect), the four most important men in her life: her father Henry Fonda and her husbands Roger Vadim, Tom Hayden and Ted Turner.  Hayden, Turner,  her son Troy Garity and her BFF Paula Weinstein get the most screen time among various confidantes.  But mostly, this film is Jane herself, neat with a chaser.

From being the daughter of a movie super star dad and a suicidal mom, through a starlet period, to the shrill activist with the Klute hairdo, to the video exercise queen and then billionaire’s bride, it a helluva story.  If you dislike Jane Fonda, you’ll find this biodoc annoying.  If you’re like me, you’ll find it fascinating.

All Together: the elderly resisting aging

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ALL TOGETHER

All Together (Et si on vivait tous ensemble?)  is a poignant French comedy about five septuagenarian friends who decide to eschew the nursing home and live communally.  They hire an anthropology grad student as a caregiver, and he changes his thesis topic to study the social and sexual behavior of the European elderly.

The comedy comes as they resist the insults of age.  One elderly activist, bullhorn in hand, is dismissed as an impotent, harmless crank when the cops refuse to arrest him at a demonstration even when he hits a cop in the helmet with a bottle.

The excellent cast includes Jane Fonda (acting for the first time in fluent French in thirty years).  Geraldine Chaplin, who has acted in French, Spanish, Italian and German films over the years, is impressively spry.   The great French comic actor Pierre Richard (The Man with the One Brown Shoe?) is brilliant as a man terrified by his increasing loss of memory.

Although it covers similar territory as this year’s indie hit The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (a slightly better film), they are different movies, with All Together more focused on mortality and the infirmities that come with age.

I saw All Together at the San Francisco Film Society’s French Cinema Now series.  All Together is now available in the US on Video On Demand, including Amazon Instant Video.