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Director Stephane Robelin says there's a growing market for films about the older set.

It's kind of a taboo subject, the sex lives of old folks. No one really wants to talk about it, let alone make movies exploring it.

Unless their name is Stephane Robelin, the French filmmaker who's tapped into the growing Baby Boomer movie market with rom-coms that deal frankly - and humorously - with the desires of the the over-80s. 

"As we are living in an aging society of course, that's interesting... this is an enormous generation [the Baby Boomers] and this generation now has the time and the money to go to films at the cinema," Robelin says during our interview in Paris.

Dominique Charriau

Director Stephane Robelin and Mr Stein star Pierre Richard.

"They are the biggest supporters of the arthouse cinema, and of course they like to see themselves represented."

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That need to see themselves on screen is entirely understandable, the All Together director says. 

GETTY

Director Stephane Robelin, centre, with the the cast of Mr Stein Goes On Line, Yannis Lespert, producer Vladimir Cosma, Pierre Richard and Fanny Valette.

"They like to see films with problems and subject they are concerned about, much more than films which are a bit away from their pre-occupations.

"I think that everybody likes to be represented, if I think of myself, if there is a film coming out about the movie industry I would go and see how they represent us."

This universality applies to particular topic - romance - too, which Robelin says is a preoccupation no matter what your age, or nationality. 

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Mr Stein Goes Online deals frankly and humorously with the love lives of the over 80s.

"When I was travelling with my previous film, I saw that it worked everywhere in the world and it was already a film talking about sexuality and love amongst older people, even in China it worked well. 

"So I think it's very universal, the only thing they said in China was, 'I hope you don't do this to your old people!' [isolate them]. But I think this type of humour and this pre-occupation with love is the same all around the world, and if I think about [New Zealand films], I think we have a lot of things in common."

That commonality hasn't always been so obvious, says Robelin, who struggled to get his first film about elderly romance made.

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Pierre Richard and Yannis Lespert in Mr Stein Goes Online.

"When I tried to really make the project [All Together] it was not so easy because people told me 'who will go and watch old people on the screen?'.

"When my film came out 2 or 3 years later, there were already other films [about older people] coming out at the same time, and then there was Amour in Cannes which was a much more darker aspect of what I show, and then suddenly senior films and senior movies were heralded as a 'new type of film'." 

Robelin's latest 'new type of film' is Mr Stein Goes Online, a romantic comedy about an elderly man who begins a virtual relationship with a woman 60 years his junior. 

Because he can't meet her in person - she thinks he's the same age as her - he pays a much younger man to pretend to be him, and lives out the relationship through him. 

That probably sounds a little creepy as romantic comedy premises go - and at points during the film, it is, which is something Robelin struggled with. 

"In fact that was the main difficulty," he says. "They are doing things that are really not nice all the time. They must stay perfectly nice, but likeable people, so I think that was why I was re-writing very much this scenario so that I could obtain the balance.

"When I showed it to other people, they say, 'But how can she forgive them for what they did to her?'.  But I was always convinced that she will forgive them because they did not cheat on purpose, they did it because they could not do it otherwise," he says. 

"The old man wanted to fall in love and the young man couldn't say that he is in love, so that was the point that I was sure that she will forgive them for what they did to her."

Comparisons to the most famous French romance Cyrano De Bergerac have amused Robelin, who says the similarities are quite accidental. ​

"When I was first writing it and it gave it to my producer and he remarked immediately that, 'oh, it's like a modern Cyrano', and while I was writing I was not at all conscious about it.  

"Maybe if I had been conscious about it it would have inhibited me to write it in that way. Of course, its unconscious and I can't deny that it's something that inhibits us."

He says "a lot " of re-writes followed the revelation, but the bones of the Cyrano-esque love triangle remain the better to showcase this intergenerational battle between Alex (Yannis Lespert) and Pierre (Pierre Richard).

Alex, the millennial, cuts a bleak figure. He's quite depressed, his girlfriend mothers him and it's putting a huge strain on their relationship. Pierre is also depressed, but for entirely different reasons - it's as if they could be cured by swapping lives for a day, to understand how they are both better off, says Robelin.

"This character [Alex] is a little bit in difficulty to enter the adult world," he says. "I was inspired by a French series where he [Lespert] is playing exactly that sort of character who has this difficulty of passage to the adult age. 

"I think he is a bit weak and not very energetic, as opposed to the old man who, himself, is so full of energy and dynamic."

Pierre's dynamism is due, in no small part, to being played by legendary actor Pierre Richard, who embus the deceitful, somewhat selfish Pierre with mountains of charm and warmth. 

"I was writing the script [for Mr Stein] before I made my previous film [All Together, 2011] and I was not thinking about casting him. 

"But when he was in All Together, I afterwards thought about him in the re-writing and I knew that Pierre wanted to make once again, a comedy.  He had made it a lot in his career and I thought that it would be right for him."

After all, Robelin says, Richard embodies the film's central message:  

"Whatever your age is, you can still live strong emotions, and that's never finished."

 - Stuff