Le Petit locataire (2016)
Directed by Nadège Loiseau

Film Review

Director Nadège Loiseau makes her feature debut by extending her earlier short film Le Locataire (2013) - a reasonable thing to attempt providing the premise of the original film is sufficiently original.  The problem with Le Petit locataire is that this is hardly the case and Loiseau has such obvious difficulty drawing out her film to feature length that she has to bung in quite a lot of irrelevant additional padding.  Thankfully, she is saved from an outright disaster by a well-appointed cast headed by a perennial favourite, Karin Viard, who is a gift to any off-beat comedy of this kind.

Viard's gently humorous but true-to-life portrayal of a woman in her late 40s coping with mid-life crises and a belated pregnancy doesn't quite make up for the gaping holes in the screenplay or the pretty uninspired mise-en-scène, but it helps prevent the film from being a complete turn-off.   Philippe Rebbot and Hélène Vincent lend Viard some credible support as her unsupportive husband and young-at-heart elderly mother, although all three struggle to make much of the lightweight material they are given.  Le Petit locataire just about makes the grade as an amiable little comedy but it is too lacking in ideas and ambition to make an entirely satisfying film.

Film Synopsis

With her husband Jean-Pierre unable to find paid work, Nicole is the breadwinner in her house, which she shares with her elderly grandmother Mamilette, her daughter Arielle and her granddaughter Zoé.  Now that she is 49, the last thing on Nicole's mind is having another child, but this is the situation she finds herself in after a pregnancy test.  Naturally her daughter is appalled by this news, and Jean-Pierre isn't wild about the prospect of becoming a father again in middle-age.  Nicole isn't going to let her family's lack of enthusiasm get her down.  Having ruled out the possibility of an abortion she soon comes to regard her pregnancy as an important milestone in her life, the start of a new chapter for both herself and her family...