A Liar's Autobiography: The Untrue Story of Monty Python's Graham Chapman

An American inherits an apartment in Paris that comes with an unexpected resident. Mathias Gold (Kevin Kline), a penniless fifty-odd-year-old New Yorker, lands in Paris. Cynical, and at the end of his tether, he looks forward to selling the mansion house his late father owned in the Marais district. But what he finds out there just appalls him: his secretive dad had never told him he had acquired the property as a life lease, a typically French custom of which he never heard. As a consequence, not only will poor Mathias be unable to sell the house into cash (at least as long as Mathilde Girard (Dame Maggie Smith) stays alive), but he will have to pay the old lady a pension as part of the bargain. —Guy Bellinger Fifty-seven year old New Yorker Mathias Gold, who prefers to be called Jim in putting his past behind him, is a thrice divorced, penniless, failed writer with nothing to show for his life, which is why he has previously tried to commit suicide. Despite the two long having been estranged, he has just inherited what was his father Max's apartment in Paris, ostensibly the rest of Max's sizable estate which was left to charity, the apartment purchased forty some odd years ago as an investment. Mathias plans to travel to Paris solely to sell the apartment, Paris where he was born and spent his very early years before living the rest of his life in New York. What he finds is an amazing, spacious apartment in the central Marais district, the unit covering two floors and which includes an outdoor garden. What he also finds is that it was purchased as a viager, an old French custom of buying and selling property in which the seller gets to live on the property until his/her death and receives a monthly stipend from the buyer in the process. In Mathias' case, the person inhabiting the apartment until her death is ninety-two year old native Brit Mathilde Girard, the apartment where Matilde's spinster daughter Chloé Girard has lived her entire life, with the monthly stipend being EUR2,400, money which Mathias does not have. While Mme Girard allows him to stay in the apartment for a price, Chloé wants Mathias gone from their lives until her still very healthy mother passes, or conversely for her to buy it outright for a mere fraction of its worth. Beyond the anger Mathias has for the Girards and his father, the latter for dumping this debt on him, Mathias has two short term missions: still to sell the property for as much as he can, it being a viager which would reduce its value despite Mme Girard's advanced age, with developer François Roy continuing to show interest in this apartment being the one difficult one before he can buy out the remainder of the units in the complex; and to raise whatever money he can in whatever way he can both to survive and to make his next EUR2,400 payment to Mme Girard in not violating the terms of the viager before he can sell. In the process, Mathias discovers the genesis and history of this viager which brings equally sad Mathias and Chloé to a better mutual understanding of their lives and their current situation. —Huggo