A man and a woman meet in the same hotel in the south of France, while spending their respective holidays alone.
The movie was released in 1972, when an unmarried woman of 30 was still called "spinster" and people, either men or women, were mocked for their being single, in two different ways.
Several moments of inappropriate humor follow each other: "Do you want a room in order to sleep or to make love?" asks the receptionist, and suddenly shows a false embarrassment, hiding some mockery, when he sees that the man who has just asked for a room is alone.
The woman is constantly shown on her own on the beach, making clumsy moves inside a big poncho to change out of her wet swimsuit, while around her, groups of people chat, flirt, and enjoy happily.
In this movie (and the French should be known for being open-minded and avant-garde...) single people are sort of "aliens", lonely, goofy and pitiful and, when a man and a woman of that kind meet, it seems they are required to "combine their loneliness", no matter if they might not like each other completely.
The same mocking humor invests the minor characters, no more than caricatures (the nymphomaniac chambermaid, the Anglican priest always talking of death, his wife who fasts and has stigmata drawn on her hands and feet...). Nothing happens, except for some stupid dialogues and some small awkward incidents, the background of the two characters is not revealed and a possible relationship between the two is just a (future) possibility.
And what does the ending mean, with the two young girls, the same who talk nonsense in the first scene, now missing their train?
If the original title is disrespectful, the Italian one, "La tardona", is highly offensive.
Review of The Old Maid
