All Together: Humorously Aging With Dignity

In the opening minutes of the light French comedy All Together, an elderly man yells, "Off the pigs!" through a bullhorn during a showdown between police and angry citizens. To his chagrin, the cops run right past him when they charge the crowd; he's even ignored after hitting one in the head with a bottle. He's pained to realize that as a senior citizen, even an unruly anarchist, he's completely invisible. Director Stéphane Robelin employs some boilerplate comedy (an aged man mooning a camera, a group of elders busting a friend out of a nursing home) but All Together isn't really about scoring cheap laughs at the sight of seniors behaving badly. It's about holding onto dignity and relationships as bodies deteriorate, memories fail, pesky emotions like lust and jealousy refuse to gracefully subside, and society treats you like an asexual nonentity. With a heavyweight cast that includes Jane Fonda (fit and gorgeous at 74 and wearing form-fitting clothing to prove it), Geraldine Chaplin, Pierre Richard, Guy Bedos, Claude Rich, and Daniel Brühl, the film tracks what happens when an elderly group of friends (various configurations of spouses, friends, and lovers) move under one roof with a young caretaker in the mix. Well-acted and directed, with melancholy grooved insights that will only be news to the young and narcissistic, Together is a pleasant way to while away an afternoon and see some old pros in great form.