If there’s one thing common to big cities all over the world, it’s surely the value of a well-located apartment. An old building filled with the character (and, sometimes, characters) of its years, access to good coffee, and a neighborhood worth walking through can all come together to make a few rooms into a home. And nowhere, perhaps, is that more true than in two of the world’s great cities: New York and Paris. This week, two films come to Amherst Cinema to tell stories about the joys and struggles of finding a place to call home in those places.
Love is Strange is a new film from director Ira Sachs, starring John Lithgow and Alfred Molina as longtime partners and newly married New York couple Ben and George. Their honeymoon is cut short, however, when the Catholic school where George teaches expresses its disapproval by firing him. Suddenly jobless—Ben’s painting alone won’t pay the bills—the pair are forced to sell their apartment and find new digs in the city. Of course, as anyone who has ever hunted for a place to live in New York can tell you, easy it ain’t. When they can’t find an affordable home, the couple has no choice but to temporarily separate; George goes to live with a pair of gay cops who live downstairs while Ben makes the exodus to Brooklyn, where he crashes with his nephew’s family.
Being apart is bad enough, but the pair also find themselves navigating some unfamiliar waters with their new roommates: George bumps up against the helter-skelter life of a younger crowd, while Ben—who is sharing a room with his nephew’s son—laments that “when you live with people, you know them better than you care to.”
Lithgow and Molina seem well suited for each other here, as two well-seasoned, salt-and-peppered men who, if they haven’t exactly struggled, have still worked hard to achieve the life they want to lead. See it snatched out from under them, and you can’t help but want to see them find just the right place to land.
Israel Horovitz’s new film My Old Lady also features a down-on-his-luck New Yorker with a real estate problem, but the apartment that is troubling Mathias Gold (Kevin Kline) is not his own. When he inherits a Paris apartment from his estranged father, Gold plans to sell the place for a tidy profit. Things take an unexpected turn when he arrives in France and finds that the apartment not only has tenants—a sharp Englishwoman named Mathilde (Maggie Smith) and her daughter Chloé—but that they have lived there for many years, and have no intention of leaving.
To make matters even more surprising, it turns out that Mathilde is not only entitled to live there, but also to collect monthly payments from Mathias until she dies—it turns out that the apartment is what the French call a viager, a term Americans might recognize as a sort of reverse-mortgage. In essence, a buyer makes a down payment to a seller—usually an aging owner looking for financial security in later years—and then continues to pay a monthly sum until the seller’s death, at which point the property becomes the buyer’s, who will have likely paid much less than the property would have brought on the open market. The key is that the seller gets to live in their home until they don’t need it any more, being dead. The question for Mathias is whether or not he can afford to wait that long.
Also at Amherst this week is the Manhattan Short Film Festival, which brings 10 short films from all over the world, all under 20 minutes and selected from a pool of almost 600, to local screens and asks the audience to vote for the winner.
Now in its 17th year, the festival unites Valley moviegoers with audiences in over 300 cities on six continents; the collected wisdom of all those film geeks will whittle the 10 down to a single winner, which will be announced Oct. 6. Past winners have gone on to Oscar nominations (and even a couple of wins), so this could be your chance for early bragging rights.•
Jack Brown can be reached at cinemadope@gmail.com.
