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The Villa ★★★½
(M) 82 minutes
Accepting Gerard Depardieu as the inmate of a nursing home requires a rather large leap of the imagination but if you can pull it off, there’s a lot to enjoy in The Villa.
I use the word inmate rather than resident because the nursing home supervisor has ruled that its occupants aren’t allowed to leave the premises. This is supposed to be for their own good, but clearly he’s a conman and it’s equally plain that he’s going to have a rebellion on his hands before Depardieu and friends are done with him.
Gerard Depardieu and Kev Adams in The Villa.
The film boasts an array of venerable star power. Along with Depardieu, cast as Lino Varton, a former boxing champion, we have Mylene Demongeot, who first made her name in the 1960s as a rival to Brigitte Bardot. She’s Simone, an ex-English teacher whose husband left her for another woman on the first day of her retirement. And fans of Call My Agent! will be pleased to become reacquainted with Liliane Rovere as the gregarious Sylvette, a retired restaurateur who’s just as fed up with the home’s restrictions as Lino is.
Help arrives in the unlikely form of Milann, a feckless character who’s been sentenced to serve out a term of community service by working in the home as a carer. He’s played by the film’s co-producer, Kev Adams, who conceived the story and co-wrote the screenplay, inspired by the maxim: inside every old person is a young person wondering what happened.
Milann doesn’t like the elderly, having grown up in an orphanage where the institution’s only old person was an extremely grumpy matron, but as he gets to know this bunch, he learns that they have much to teach him – and vice versa. He introduces Lino to PlayStation and, in return, Lino gives him boxing lessons in the hope they will help him deal with the loan sharks who are stalking him.
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It’s an entirely predictable storyline with a feel-good ending guaranteed from the start, and at times it works a little too hard in devising the menu of eccentricities that make up the characterisations, but it’s fun watching this team of consummate professionals balance the comic and the poignant while deftly keeping mawkishness at bay. There’s a pleasing matter-of-factness in the playful bits of business that go into their day-to-day routines and Adams negotiates Milann’s discovery of his better self with a nervy astonishment that’s very funny.