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Almost Peaceful

2002, Movie, NR, 94 mins

Almost Peaceful: Review

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Set in Paris in 1946, Michel Deville's quiet drama, adapted from Robert Bober's novel Quoi de neuf sur la guerre?, follows a group of French Jews as they pick up the pieces of their interrupted lives after liberation. "Everyone had his own war," says tailor Albert (Simon Abkarian) philosophically; he's a natural anchor to whom wounded people gravitate. Albert and his wife, Lea (Zabou Breitman) survived the war in hiding; Lea and their children, Raphael and Betty, with a farm family and Alfred above another tailor's store. They run a small dressmaking shop whose employees include handsome, fiery Leon (Vincent Elbaz) and his wife, Jacqueline (Lubna Azabal), who have a small son and another child on the way; they joined the Resistance during the war and Leon now channels his energy into Yiddish theater. Charles (Denis Podalydes) and his family were deported to separate concentration camps, but only Charles returned. He lives in a hotel room opposite their old apartment, clinging to a shred of hope that his wife and children may yet come back. Though the shop is in a summer lull, Albert hires two extra sewing-machine operators, quietly competent Maurice (Stanislas Merhar), who survived the camps and is engaged in a tentative relationship with a pragmatic prostitute (Clotilde Courau), and clumsy but eager-to-please Joseph (Malik Zidi), who was arrested with his parents but fled as they were about to board a train. Joseph spent the rest of the war surviving by his wits. The shop's only gentile employee, Mme. Andree (Julie Gayet), shares little about her private life until she confides that her sister shamed their family by having an affair with a German soldier and bearing his child. Despite the enormity of the tragedy against which their stories play out, the film's drama comes from an accumulation of muted encounters that remind the survivors what they've lost and what they've regained. Joseph registers for housing and finds himself face to face with the same police official who arrested his family. Lea confesses to Charles that she feels Albert no longer loves her. The children come home from summer camp, accompanied by a boy whose parents never returned after the war. Albert refuses to give Mme. Andree's sister a job; he can forgive almost any frailty, but not collaboration. Deville gently reveals that they're all simultaneously hauntingly fragile and amazingly resilient, their smiles as piercing as any resigned gaze. leave a comment --Maitland McDonagh
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