Maggie Smith in My Old Lady (Cohen Media Group)

My Old Lady puts a sophisticated Parisian spin on the movie genre of forced, shared real estate relationships, but with more drama than the froth of George Seaton’s Apartment for Peggy (1948) and without the spookiness of Roman Polanski’s The Tenant (1976).

Turns out French housing law traditions are even more complicated than New York City rent control battles between longtime tenants and new landlords. American Mathias Gold (Kevin Kline) is looking for his last chance in life to find an address in Paris, but someone else is still living there, Madame Mathilde Girard (Maggie Smith). She looks like she may already be dead—so he hopes. The almost 60 year-old American, who has no other prospects, is relieved, though, that she is an English teacher. He thinks it should be easy to communicate to her that he’s inherited the large apartment with a garden from the traveling businessman father he hardly knew, which he intends to sell it to aggressive property developer.

But can anyone do disdainful spite better than Dame Maggie, sans make-up and wig, when she dismisses the potential buyer? Because Mathilde has something to teach him: his father bought the apartment more than 40 years ago as a viager. Instead of a lump-sum payment outright, he agreed to pay a monthly fee to her until she parts from this world. The real estate agent (Dominique Pinon) explains the system to him (their comic interplay continues after the credits), and her doctor (Noémie Lvovsky) pronounces that the 90-year-old could live until age 120. Additionally, Gold already owes her money (that he pays for by snooping around for items to sell).

His negotiations to rent back a room are complicated when it turns out her brittle daughter, Chloé (Kristin Scott Thomas), also lives in this old-fashioned, one-bathroom apartment, and seems more committed to this home than to her married lover, Philippe (Stéphane De Groodt). While the run-ins and run-outs in the bathroom and on the stairs and eavesdropping behind closed doors seem more like the actions of the much younger people sharing a similar space in Cédric Klapisch’s L’auberge espagnole (2002), septuagenarian debut director Israel Horovitz slowly reveals how their immaturity results from the serious emotional damage of broken marriages and tragic family relationships that prevented warm parenting.

The exploration of the lasting impact of mothers and fathers who selfishly put their desires over their children’s needs produces at least a more satisfying result than this summer’s earlier attempt at a grown-up love story in Fred Schepisi’s Words and Pictures—until the romantic lives get tangled in a way too familiar from just about every nighttime soap. Sadly, Dame Maggie recedes into the background, bowing under the recriminations. Visually, the best scenes are with Kline charmingly channeling Gene Kelly from Vincente Minnelli’s An American in Paris (1951) in strolls through the neighborhood. He even sings, too.