“The Good Life” is a perfect wedding of dynamic characters and subject. Though Eva Mulvad's delightful study of the Beckmanns—a once-wealthy Danish mother and her middle-aged daughter, Anne Mette, now living together in a small apartment in Portugal with only the elderly woman's pension as income—is being touted as a modern-day Grey Gardens, that comparison is misleading. Whereas the Maysles were accused of exploitation for training their lens on a squalor-dwelling, mother-daughter duo whose sanity could be called into question, these snappy dames, whose back-and-forth banter has the comedic timing of a vaudeville act, are undeniably of sound minds—which makes their fall into hard times all the more poignant.
To read the rest of my review visit Slant Magazine.
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