Blu-ray Review: ‘Last Love’

In Last Love, Michael Caine plays American Matthew Morgan, a recently widowed man trying to find some meaning in his life. The retired college professor and his wife Joan (Jane Alexander) live in Paris. As the film opens, Matthew is bereft when Joan dies after a long illness. He has only been going through the motions of his daily life for three years, until he has a chance meeting one day on a bus with Pauline Laubie (Clémence Poésy, Fleur Delacour in the Harry Potter films). Pauline is also a teacher—a dance teacher. She encourages Matthew to come and try her class. He does one day, with a friend, Colette (Anne Alvaro), and attempts the cha-cha.

He is strongly drawn to Pauline and keeps going back to her class. Joan still appears to him at times, when he feels lonely and has the need to talk to her. It is a running joke that Matthew doesn’t speak French, having moved to France only to please Joan, but for the first time in his life he tries to speak a little with Pauline. Spending time with Pauline helps Matthew thaw a little, but that becomes almost too painful for him to bear and he “self-medicates” himself into the hospital. As Matthew and Pauline try to understand what sort of relationship they are forming, Matthew’s grown children, Miles and Karen (Justin Kirk and Gillian Anderson), with whom he’s never been close, show up to complicate matters even further, “Joan wanted kids, and I just wanted her.”

The Blu-ray of Last Love is in English, but some dialogue is in French with subtitles. The film has a running time of 115 minutes. The aspect ratio is 1.85:1, widescreen format, and it looks great on a large-scale, high-definition television screen. Details, like texture, pop in scenes featuring Paris and the gorgeous French countryside, as well as in the beautifully-lit interiors of Matthew and Pauline’s apartments and the places they visit. The sound (DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1), including dialogue and musical score, is crisp and clear.

Extras on the disc include deleted scenes and outtakes. The film (also known as Mr. Morgan’s Last Love) is not rated, but the story, although sad, is appropriate for any age. Kids would likely find it too slow and talky. There are two film previews for R-rated films included on the Blu-ray disc, and one of them is definitely not appropriate for younger viewers.

Director Sandra Nettelbeck (Mostly Martha) based Last Love on Francoise Dorner’s novel La Douceur Assassine. She wrote the screenplay with Caine in mind, “I wrote the second script entirely for him… I couldn’t stop seeing him in my mind when I was writing… He read it and said yes right away… He understood what it was about and why I wanted him to do it.”

Caine and Poésy are very nice together, and the beautiful-looking film is full of emotional nuance. Viewers may at first dislike Matthew’s son Miles, but he has a complicated relationship with his father and at least wants to try to understand him. His sister Karen seems to have come to Paris, not to see her father in the hospital, but to go shopping. Last Love is about love, family, life, death, and grief. It’s even got a bit of a twist. It’s understated, but it’s a nice showcase of 80-year-old acting veteran Michael Caine at the top of his game.