ALMOST PEACEFUL (Un monde presque paisible)
After the horrors of World War II, Monsieur Albert (Simon Abkarian, "The Truth About Charlie") creates a patchwork extended family of Jewish survivors with his wife Léa (Zabou Breitman) and the employees of his Parisian tailoring shop in an existence that is "Almost Peaceful."
while there are many films about the Holocaust, writer/director Michel Deville tells a part of the story that is rarely addressed, the carrying on of everyday life after experiencing the worst life has to offer. This gently comic tale is structured almost like a slamming-door theater piece, with characters coming into and out of Albert's large workspace to relate their stories.
Albert and his family (his and Léa's children write and send drawings from a country camp, a word which startles even when used benignly as it is here) survived the war hidden away in a secret space much like Anne Frank's family. Charles (Denis Podalydès, "Safe Conduct") stands on his apartment balcony, still watching for the return of his wife and daughter from a concentration camp. In the film's greatest irony, Léa confides to Charles that she is lonely, but Charles rebuffs her advances telling her that he is still in the company of his wife.
Léon (Vincent Elbaz), a man with matinee-idol looks, longs to be an actor. His lovely wife Jacqueline (Lubna Azabal) awaits the birth of their next child. Mademoiselle Andrée (Julie Gayet) looks to her boss as a father figure while young Joseph's (Malik Zidi, "Place Vendôme") klutziness is tolerated in the tailor shop like a family doting on its youngest. The other bachelor, good-looking Maurice (Stanislas Merhar, "Dry Cleaning"), avoids relationships by patronizing a whorehouse, yet he fails to see that his loyalty to the sweet Simone (Clotilde Courau) is turning into one. The group's only outsider is Mademoiselle Sarah (Sylvie Milhaud) who visits selling wares from scented soap to Holocaust art and acts like the group yenta.
Deville's film is pleasant, its characters good company, but it does not sustain itself, its personality not strong enough to make the film memorable. Abkarian, who resembles William Powell, gives a lusty performance as the caring patriarch, but Deville doesn't allow us to see the chinks in his marriage that would make Léa turn to Charles, who in many ways is Albert's opposite. All of the characters seem to have adjusted to their new life too easily.
The film's production is modest, its action taking place primarily in the workroom and at an outdoors country outing. Deville inexplicably chooses to edit in still photos and the technique does nothing for the film, nor is it evenly deployed. One fantasy sequence, where Andrée transports Albert and Léa's son Samuel into a fairy tale about a little boy who has to breath through buttonholes, charms at the same time as it raises gooseflesh with its implied meaning.
C+
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