Two ladies – mother and daughter – live on the sunny Portuguese coast. Throughout their entire lives, they have had more than enough money to live the good life – no work and lots of pleasure. But now they have a problem: Their wealth has run out! A jet set upper-class life is substituted by unpaid bills and by a constant fear of not being able to pay next month’s rent – and the daughter, who has never worked a day in her life, is now forced to forget her decadent lifestyle and try to create an independent life for herself at the age of 56.
We meet the little family when the father has just died. Mother and daughter have unwillingly had to move from their huge luxurious home into a small flat – which they can hardly afford. The mother gets a Danish pension, but that is far from enough to cover the monthly expenses of two grown women who are used to having all the money they need. So Anne Mette and her mother Mette borrow money from friends, shop on credit at the local grocery stores and pay their dentist with a painting from their living room wall. Anne Mette tries to find a job, but it is more than difficult to enter a strained job market in times of worldwide economical crisis with an empty CV and a rich kid attitude. –danishdocumentary.com
When one sees The Good Life without any foreknowledge of its background or classification, it takes a while for one to realize that one is watching a carefully scripted and elaborately “staged” documentary… read review
