Netflix streaming – I gave it 4 stars. They rated it as a 4.4 for me, with the general audience rating it as a 3.8. Rotten Tomatoes only has it at 29% for critics, 9% for “top critics”, and with their audience giving it 55%. It would be interesting to correlate Netflix 5-point scale scores with Rotten Tomatoes’ audience percentages.
This movie is difficult to believe in a few spots, but if I ignore that, it is certainly touching and believable in the rest of it. Michael Caine and Clemence Poesy are very good in this as the two leads. It’s not a romantic comedy, despite a first look that might lead one to believe that an unlikely romance is going to form between the elderly man and the beautiful, vulnerable young woman. I get the impression that foreign movies show women smoking as being sophisticated, while American ones show women smoking as a way to identify them as villains or bad people in general. That might just be my impression.