My Old Lady (Très Chère Mathilde)
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PRESENTE / PRESENTEERT MY OLD LADY (TRÈS CHÈRE MATHILDE) un film de / een film van Israel Horovitz avec / met Kevin Kline, Kristin Scott Thomas, Maggie Smith, Stéphane Freiss, Dominique Pinon, Noémie Lvovsky Film adapté de sa pièce de théâtre à succès Très chère Mathilde. Verfilming van zijn bekroonde toneelstuk My Old Lady. TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2014 BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 2014 UK, USA, France/Frankrijk - 2014 - DCP - couleur/kleur - 1:2.35 - VO ST BIL / OV FR/NL OT - 106' distribution / distributie: IMAGINE SORTIE NATIONALE RELEASE 3/12/2014 T : 02 331 64 31 / F : 02 331 64 34 / M : 0499 25 25 43 photos / foto’s : www.imaginefilm.be/PRO SYNOPSIS FR Mathias, quinquagénaire new-yorkais fauché, arrive à Paris pour vendre l'appartement que lui a légué son père. Il découvre que cette belle demeure est habitée par une vieille dame, Mathilde, qui vit en compagnie de sa fille Chloé. Il apprend bientôt que Mathilde et son père furent amants. NL Mathias, een aan lager wal geraakte New Yorkse vijftiger, komt in Parijs aan om het appartement dat zijn vader hem naliet, te verkopen. Hij ontdekt dat het prachtige huis bewoond wordt door een kranige 90-jarige vrouw, Mathilde, en haar dochter Chloé. Hij komt ook vrij snel te weten dat Mathilde en zijn vader geliefden waren. EN Penniless New Yorker Mathias travels to Paris to liquidate a huge apartment he has inherited from his estranged father. He is stunned to find a refined old lady (Mathilde) living there with her very protective daughter. He soon learns that under ancient French law, he will not actually gain possession of the apartment until Mathilde dies. With its unique blend of comedy, drama and, ultimately, romance, MY OLD LADY marks the directorial debut of internationally celebrated playwright-screenwriter Israel Horovitz. TAGLINE HE’S IN THE WILL. SHE’S IN THE WAY. ABOUT THE PRODUCTION Viager: a well-established equity release plan in France, which, broadly speaking, allows the release of cash to a property owner in return for an interest in the property on the owner's death. (It is more common for property owners over the age of 70, to consider such a transaction.) On the flip side, the viager is also advantageous to a buyer who wishes to purchase investment property rather than to purchase a home for himself. Before MY OLD LADY was a film, it was a hit play, premiering in New York City at the Promenade Theater on West 76th Street in October 2002, before a lengthy run abroad, including productions in Germany, Russia, and of course, France. At the heart of both movie and play is the murky French real estate arrangement known as the viager, in which the buyer pays a monthly fee to the seller in lieu of a lump sum, forgoing the right to occupy the property until the seller's death. For the buyer's heirs, however, this can turn a simple inheritance into a years-long ordeal if the seller is in good health. Enter Mathias Gold, a hapless New Yorker, at once childless, spouse-less, and penniless, having spent the bulk of his almost sixty years basking in resentment towards his estranged businessman father. Mathias hopes to quickly sell the apartment bequeathed to him, as Paris calls to mind his father's frequent trips to the city, which placed a strain on his parents' marriage, culminating in his mother's suicide. For the movie version, Horovitz sought to both simplify and broaden aspects of his story. Mathilde became an Englishwoman living in France, eliminating any language barrier among characters while allowing the viager concept to occupy a more central presence in the story. "It's such a rare and uniquely French tradition," Horovitz admits. "France is the only country I know where it's active and present. I'd always envisioned an American placed in this mix as a foil, because the concept is explosive to an American mind: You put your money down on a property, essentially betting that somebody's going to die sooner rather than later." Horovitz also expanded the play's setting to include a grander, more cinematic vision of Paris than the one that was merely implied on stage. "The play is populated by three actors in one room, and the decision to expand the film's setting wasn't because I felt the story was too contained in that room, or didn't work," Horovitz explains. "I just felt that images of Paris would add another huge dimension to the story." Horovitz is no stranger to the French capital, having first basked in the city's many cultural delights in his early 20s, as a drama student in London, where he was the first American to be chosen as the playwright-in-residence at the Royal Shakespeare Company. Traveling with his wife and newborn daughter, Rachael, who would go on to co-produce the film MY OLD LADY, to visit his parents, who were vacationing in Paris, Horovitz fell instantly in love with the City of Lights. "As soon as my feet touched down in Paris, I did all the American stuff," he explains. "Tracking down Sylvia Beach's bookstore, visiting the Café Flore and Les Deux Magots, where I saw Simone de Beauvoir sitting alone on the terrace, smoking and writing in a notebook. I smiled at her and she smiled back at me — I was flirting with Simone de Beauvoir on my first visit to Paris!" After five decades spent adoring Paris, Horovitz sought to write a play and subsequent screenplay that would be a kind of valentine to the French capital, culminating in 2002's off- Broadway production MY OLD LADY starring Siân Phillips as Mathilde, Peter Friedman as Mathias and Jan Maxwell as Chloé. A screenplay adaptation followed several years later, with Horovitz cohort Kevin Kline dropping by the playwright's Greenwich Village residence for intermittent readings as the film script branched out from its theatrical roots. Dame Maggie Smith was the first actor to officially sign on to the film version, for the role of 92-year-old Mathilde Girard. Horovitz traveled to London to meet with the stage and screen veteran, who accepted the part amid 25 competing scripts offered to her at the time. Horovitz recalls Smith joking during the meeting that it was the only script in the stack that didn't end with her character dying. Adds Horovitz: "To my knowledge, it's the first time Dame Maggie's done a movie in which she doesn't wear a wig." Never mind the fact that Smith appears in MY OLD LADY with minimal make-up. "I wanted a specific reality to Mathilde — I didn't want the audience to feel like there was anything between them and her," Horovitz continues. "Maggie Smith isn't even close to being in her 90s, but she had had to act as if she were, and I didn't want it to be artificial, like something we painted on her — because nobody would believe it. She totally got it, and arrived on set with minimal makeup and no wig and delivered a totally believable performance." Producer Rachael Horovitz marveled at Maggie's transformation into Mathilde. "It was stunning to watch her transform herself without wigs and props," Horovitz recalls. "She was using pure acting skill to turn into this character that was so many years older than herself." Kevin Kline's considerable body of work over several decades on both stage and screen — including an Academy Award for his work in A Fish Called Wanda (1988) — made him ideally suited to the central role of Mathias Gold, the slightly bumbling and adrift middle-aged New Yorker who travels to Paris thinking he's about to strike pay dirt through the quick sale of an inherited apartment, only to discover real-estate and relationship turmoil that sends his broken life in a new direction. Kline came to the production semi-attached, having helped his friend Israel Horovitz develop the Mathias character, warming to the character and readily agreeing to take the part because — as Kline quipped to Horovitz during its gestation from stage to screen — it might be the last time as an actor that he gets the girl. Kline brings to MY OLD LADY a career- sampling aptitude for droll comedy, serious gravitas and musical talent, culled from years of stellar work in everything from Sophie’s Choice and The Big Chill to his stage work in The Pirates of Penzance (for which he won a Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical) as well as plays by Shakespeare, Chekhov and Shaw. "Kevin has marvelous instincts as an actor," insists Horovitz. "He has an uncanny ability to give a director several variations on the same scene — a lighter one, a heavier one, but always a truthful one. Thus, in editing, I had everything I needed to capture the sort of tragi- comic performance our film demanded. Kevin gives a great performance as Mathias. His work, for me, defines thrilling." Producers Rachael Horovitz (Moneyball, HBO's Grey Garden) and Gary Foster (The Soloist, Sleepless in Seattle) got the script to Kristin Scott Thomas, who signed on immediately to play Mathilde's confrontational daughter Chloé, having already worked with Kevin Kline on Irwin Winkler's Life as a House in 2001. (Producer-director Winkler was best man in Israel's wedding, and the two had worked together previously on the 1982 comedy Author! Author! starring Al Pacino). Furthermore, Scott Thomas and Smith had already played mother and daughter on two previous occasions — in 2001's Gosford Park and 2005's Keeping Mum, giving MY OLD LADY a friends-and-family pedigree that dovetailed well with the script's intimate tone and trajectory.