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Thomas Gilou’s film – which features a gerontophobe forced to work in an nursing home – evacuates death to joke generously with mechanical sketches and life lessons.
In Retirement home, we discover Kev Adams snoozing on a sofa next to a half-eaten rice cake. Unfair competition and lost in advance, so much here the cake has more flavor than the actor and that all the gags (like confusing Ehpad and iPad) have much more crunch than the soothing demo of good feelings in the service of the third age. We mightn’t have dreamed of a better timing than the Orpea scandal to sell us Kev Adams as a gerontophobe forced to work in a nursing home. Here he is quickly converted into Hercules restoring dignity to the boarders, but he should not be asked to clean the stables of Augeas either. Confronted with an old lady’s soiled bed or forced to hold Gérard Depardieu’s penis in the toilet, he panics, reluctantly, closes his eyes. It’s just like a film that evacuates death, decay or the passage of time, and prefers to joke handsomely regarding it (the Alzheimer’s disease is treated there in vaudeville).
Growth crisis
Retirement home makes a perfect double with Haters (2021), the other turnip…
