A Grand Quiet

Goddamn old people and their shitty movies. The Time of Their Lives is a wastebag of a film, as poor as the photoshopping on that dreadful poster. Perhaps it’s not their fault they are no longer able to have orginal ideas, that they are so inured to the way things used to be that the furthest steps take them to banality. The film’s idea of a feminist statement is that a woman should not have to put up with an abusive husband.

Perhaps a higher budget would have helped as this thing was clearly shot for pennies, there’s almost humour to be found in the way it struggles to paint whatever cheap-ass french town they got here to be some vision of continental luxury when in reality it looks like hot garbage. On every street, outside every restaurant the same half dozen young men loiter, I think they were asked to bring their own cameras as they always have the same Canons slung around their necks.

Perhaps the low budget appeal would have been greater if it actually stuck to its guns, but the repeated and blatant product placement smacks you right in the face. Ever heard of Brittany Ferries, dear God you will. It’s hard, they’re just trying to make their art, they’re not getting all Sandlery about it, but still.

There’s humour to be had in some of the performances I guess, Joan Collins attempting to hitchhike catches some air in a character otherwise as tawdry and miserable as a deflated balloon. The way Pauline Collins take some experimental tokes of a joint, though based on her and Franco Nero’s interpretation of high I doubt either had ever had first hand experience. Which must be wrong right? These cats in their seventies, they got to have experimented at some point in their lives.

Maybe it’s just Writer/Director Roger Goldby who hasn’t. His script is the trashiest trash. His characters bear no resemblance to any sort of human. The way the film traffics in its subject matter of dead sons and estranged mothers is weak and exploitative. This ain’t even his first feature, he had one back in 2007 which I never saw, he’s been working in television in the meantime, apparently he’s done a good job of it. On the big screen this looks like television, achingly so, seems like most of the crew is from that world. Picture, sound, the edit, all so flat and monotonous and clunking.

Leasy towards the end they ship in Joley Richardson to give the film some class in a performance that it totally does not deserve. Somehow transforming the idiotic climax of the film into something approaching emotion. I’m just gonna restate here how incomprehensible it is. Seriously. It’s so dumb, so dumb. So, so dumb.

I’m not sure the age of Mr Goldby, in his forties maybe. I wonder why this was the film he wanted to make, given how it’s about characters he don’t understand, in a place he don’t understand, where all the French speak English cos I guess he don’t understand the language neither. I wonder why people gave him money for it.

Stop giving mediocre white men your money, people. They only gonna end up producing shit.