Quartile rating: 6.5/10 · 1 rating
Because of his wavering health, Monsieur Henri can no longer live alone in his Paris appartment. Particularly grumpy, he ends up nonetheless accepting his son Paul's suggestion that he let one of his rooms out to a young female student. Far from falling for her charms, Henri uses her to orchestrate utter family chaos...
A competent French comedy-drama adapted from a stage play, The Student and Mister Henri benefits from a reliably structured and warmly observed script about generational conflict and family dynamics. The theatrical origins show in the chamber-piece pacing and dialogue-heavy scenes, and Claude Brasseur delivers a dependably prickly central performance. Cinematography is functional and unambitious, as expected from a stage-to-screen adaptation of this type. The novelty is limited — the grumpy-old-man-disrupts-family setup is familiar territory, and the film rarely transcends its source material's stage conventions. The ending is reasonably satisfying without being particularly surprising. A pleasant, mid-tier crowd-pleaser that works within its modest ambitions.