Tatie Danielle

A slight, eventually monotonous fable that is frequently very very funny. Its use of the medium may be rudimentary, and its general conceit - an old woman is a real pain to her family - hardly complex, but there is a real pleasure in seeing sheer, unwarranted nastiness in action. Tatie Danielle is the kind of wearingly negative OAP we all hope we'll grow up into.

The movie starts with Danielle being generally unpleasant to her equally elderly servant-companion, Odile, in a monstrous parody of the Barbie/Mabel relationship in THE JEWEL IN THE CROWN. They share a large house outside Paris - Odile doing all the chores to a chorus of ingratitude and hostility; Danielle accusing her of senility and thieving . A short visit from her nephew, Jean-Pierre's family, inspires in Danielle the desire to live with them in Paris, and fortuitously (or is it?) Odile meets with a fatal accident cleaning the chandelier on a rickety chair. Danielle sells her house, shares the money with her nephew and spinster niece, Jeanne, to ensure moving in with the former.

Here, she is an absolute horror, refusing to eat at dinner, insulting Jean-Pierre's wife, Catherine's cooking and looks, kicking the dog, deliberately losing the youngest child in the park. The family refuse to believe she is mean because of her financial generosity, but the barrage begins to wear. Just before they intend to holiday in Greece, with Danielle staying with Jeanne, the latter is dumped by her boyfriend when she announces her pregnancy; Jean-Pierre suggests she accompany them: a helper must be found for Danielle.

Outraged, Danielle ups her offensive. She begins to overeat to get sick, and throws water on the bed, feigning wetting. In a brilliantly farcical sequence, she disrupts her nephew's dinner with friends by turning on the TV at a blaring volume, begging for food and visibly defecating in her nightie. Eventually the family find a minder, Sandrine, and set off. But Sandrine refuses to take any nonsense, and after a power struggle and touching thawing , leaves Danielle to spend a last night with her American boyfriend. Left alone, Danielle deteriorates, lets the apartment go to pot, and sets it on fire. A national outrage ensues over this perceived abandonment and Danielle becomes a celebrity, while the family are taken to court for negligence. Her fraud is revealed, though, and she ends up in an old folks' home...

TATIE is very reminiscent of Renoir's masterpiece BOUDU SAUVE DES EAUX, in which a tramp rescued by a kindly bourgeois wreaks havoc on his benefactor. Danielle, for all her unpleasantness, is a subversive presence, disrupting complacent bourgeois domesticity, telling hard truths. The family aren't vile money-grabbers, and despite some grotesqueness, are an essentially decent lot. They are the new France, boasting shiny apartments with all mod cons, and bright colour schemes, tolerant liberal attitudes (one son is a gay dancer), dinner parties, trips to Greece. Their only crimes are pretentiousness, homogeneity (note the similarity of their names), and self satisfaction, but they are hardly Bunuellian monsters.

Danielle is the France they'd like to forget, reminder of a colonialist and collaborationist past. Her childlessness is linked to sterility and the pinched nature of her character; her husband died 50 years ago, just before the Fall of France? He is a seeming image of French glory and military prowess undermined by his comic looks. She is a past that refuses to be suppressed and her power reveals the fragility and superficiality of bright, modern, consumerist France, how easily it can descend into chaos and fragmentation. Catherine becomes a bag of nerves, Jean-Pierre convenes Mafia-like meetings to discuss family crises.

TATIE is very brave in never selling out on the character of Danielle, who, in Hollywood, would surely be reduced to mush. There is as much ridicule as pathos in her conversation with her dead husband, and her growing affection for the only character who won't cow before her is disabled by a lack of human sympathy and insight. We love Danielle precisely because she is so unbearable, a vile Id that cannot be swept away.

Tsilla Chelton's sublime performance, a mixture of evil, moroseness, regret and childish mischief, keeps the film watchable, although by the end one has probably had enough. The coda is delightful, though, rejecting cosy ideas of moral regeneracy. The style is more subtle than it first appears, with its plays of light and space serving to suffocate Danielle in her environment, and there are some pleasant, if conventionally mild, surreal long shots, involving an adorable, soon-to-be-betrayed dog.

This should be a cult film for those with mean elderly relatives. We have recommended this to folks with hypercritical mothers, mothers-in-law, and others, who also said "She's mean." And nobody else believes them, because the relative can be just so nice to others. we've seen the little smirk that comes across her face when she makes somebody else suffer. She is also willing to suffer herself, if it means others suffer even more.

This film rings so true that it must have been based somebody's actual experience. Packaging family angst as a comedy probably wouldn't sell in Hollywood, so we have to pick this up from the French.

Cinematically, it's better than average, with notable performances from Tati and her niece and nephew.

It's charming and amusing to boot.

Tsilla Chelton gives a flawless performance as the cunning, scheming, mischievous old widow Auntie Danielle, She commands our attention in every scene and she is on the screen most of the time. Her aged housekeeper companion Odile is driven frantic by this cantankerous old shrew who insists she completes the most impossible and dangerous tasks such as cleaning the chandeliers. Her nephew and niece move in to look after her in her supposedly frail state of health and she makes life absolute hell for them, too. She has a framed photograph of her late husband Edouard hanging on the wall and she consults him on all her personal matters. I found these conversations highly amusing. The most entertaining part of the movie is when the relatives take off for Greece leaving Auntie Danielle under the care of a young woman employed to look after her. Sparks fly when these two obstinate individuals come face to face neither giving way to the other, The bed-wetting scene is quite a gem, but there are many other incidents which are equally amusing. The ending of the film in the Alps comes somewhat as a surprise as we see a complete transformation of Auntie. The spirited singing at the beginning and the end has nothing to do with the story, but I think it is a charming and original addition to a film which keeps you chuckling long after the credits have rolled.

I have to say that I don't like this film. I love French films because I think they are more in depth, thought-provoking, and spend more time developing relationships between the characters. Unfortunately, Tatie Danielle is cruel and mean. She criticizes everybody but herself. She makes everybody else's life worse than hers by her actions. The way she treats people including the old woman who cared for her in the beginning of the film is exceptionally cruel when it causes her death. She moves in with unsuspecting relatives who have two young sons. One son is obviously homosexual but the parents either ignore it just turned a blind eye to it. Not Tatie Danielle! You can imagine what she has to say and do. Just look what she does to the family pet dog. Anyway, she finally meets her match in the caretaker assigned to her when the family takes a much-needed Greek vacation for a month. If only Americans could take month-long vacations, how I envy the French. Anyway, they get along until she has to leave her. Then Tatie Danielle gets famous for her poor treatment by getting national sympathy. When she's not in the old folks home after that incident, she is away with her caretaker somewhere. I don't know. I think Tatie's cruelty is just too much for me or anyone.

You have probably read the others viewers comments and you know that this woman Tatie Danielle is very very bad. But I think she's worst than that! In 99 % of the movies, old women are funny, or touching. Not desperados or delinquent. But Tatie is. Or worst... Despite that, this movie is also very sarcastic about middle class families, and a certain way of life. This is truly very unique, a real mastepiece of black humor. One of my favorite comic movie of all time. Let's hope Hollywood will never make a remake.