Late Bloomers

While I was on holiday in Holland and wasn’t snowboarding or biking everywhere, I found a couple of English-language channels on my villa’s TV and spent a good deal of time watching various TV shows and movies on it. I watched Perfect Sense, a film with a good concept which ironically made no sense at all; Friends with Kids, a very slow-paced romcom about having a child and not being married; and Late Bloomers, a 2011 comedy drama film by French director Julie Gavras.

Late Bloomers is the film I remember most about, which is odd as I felt like not paying attention to most of the film would not have made any difference to understanding the plot. The film is about a married couple reaching their sixties and worrying about becoming old, or ‘zombies’ as the male protagonist, Adam (played by William Hurt), describes it. His wife Mary (played by Isabella Rossellini) accepts the change and begins to make reforms to their lifestyles, much to the displeasure of her husband.

The film has some ingeniously funny moments in it. Mary worries that she is getting Alzheimer’s but her doctor tells her she is not and to stay active, making her take part in aqua-aerobics. Compared to the ridiculously over-the-top male instructor and the mid-to-late-20s women in the pool with her, attempts to keep up with everything leads to a hilarious scene of aimlessly flailing foam tubes around. This scene is mostly focused on the facial expressions of Mary, however, which are very funny – the acting is definitely very strong and scenes like this benefit from it. Another memorable scene involves the couple in bath together. While Adam appears to be unaware, Mary has installed wall bars.

The film stands out as very different from typical movies with very long shots usually encompassing the entirety of the scene – in the bath scene that I detailed above, the entire scene is one shot. Not only is this style not usually used in popular films (the publisher was the Gaumont Film Company who have housed directors such as Hitchcock previously and are responsible for the highest-grossing film in France, Intouchables), but the soundtrack is also very atypical. As most of the film is focused around the drama aspects and there is less focus on the comedy, the light-hearted soundtrack feels out of place, especially during a funeral which Mary is late to get to.

Like I just said, the film is more focused on the drama aspect, making it more like a chore to watch than anything else. One scene that stood out as too long and too boring (and almost entirely pointless) was a scene in which Mary invites a social group of elderly men and women into her house, taking Adam by surprise. The intention of the scene was presumably to make Adam understand more about old age life and make him more amiable to the concept but most of what the old people said was anecdotal and offered nothing to the story at all. The scene was almost 10 minutes of people exchanging stories, followed by a laugh and a bad attempt at a smile by Adam, before it ended suddenly and these people aren’t seen again in the movie save one very short scene.

In conclusion, the movie was a bit too boring for my tastes, but I did enjoy the comedy scenes, as the acting was good. Yet still, in my opinion the music didn’t fit and there was too many pointless scenes, which overall gives me mixed feelings about it.

By watching this movie I reinforced the same idea that I learned from Sinister – that plot progression needs to happen at a consistent pace so that viewers can enjoy it more. Secondly, I discovered that strong acting can really benefit in a movie in which most of the comedy is visual. Lastly, I found that sometimes the subtleties of mise-en-scene (like the wall bars in the bathroom) can also be helpful for adding certain effects to the scene or putting a message through to the audience that the characters in the film are deliberately unaware of, similar to the ‘it’s behind you’ pantomime cliché that I noticed in Sinister, although to a different effect.