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.