I finally got another disc delivery for the first time since last year. It's rather hard to coordinate the timing with streaming, so this meant yet another foreign-language flick about a Jewish guy. Oh well, still not all that similar.
In occupied Paris, the Langmann family is laying low, tho not quite to an Anne Frank extent. Eight-year-old Claude (Alain Cohen) keeps calling unwelcome attention to himself, so his parents send him to live in the countryside with the parents of a friend of theirs, who will gladly take care of a pseudo-grandchild for however many months. (The French title translates to "The Old Man and the Boy.) That arrangement is safer overall, but Claude has to maintain a charade of being Catholic like them. They -- perhaps especially the outspoken old man (Michel Simon), who asks Claude to call him Pépé -- believe the propaganda about Jews.
As anti-Semites go, Pépé's pretty likable. A bit rough and arrogant in his masculinity, sure, but friendly enough. He shows unusual compassion for animals for the time, spoiling his old dog rotten and wishing his wife (Luce Fabiole) would join him in vegetarianism. Yes, there have been such rumors about Hitler himself, but this display is more obvious. Anyway, when Pépé talks about Jews and other slandered demographics, it's apparent that they're rather abstract to him; he's never knowingly met any. Maybe I give him a lot of leeway because of his age, reminding me of a stereotypical embarrassing relative. He and Mémé needle each other a lot, but it's not abusive, and I think they continue to love each other on some level.
Claude has his own considerable faults. After hearing warnings ad nauseam from his father (Charles Denner), he still puts the whole family in jeopardy by acting as if the situation were normal. I can understand this in light of what many grown-ups do during a pandemic, but some of his actions would be plenty bad at any time. In one of his first scenes, he attempts to shoplift toys and, when caught, bites his captor hard. No surprise he has nothing to say when Dad asks why he does these things; even his narration in adulthood offers no explanation beyond destiny. That said, he's usually laconic anyway, at least until he gets comfortable with Pépé and Mémé.
Oddly enough, nobody in that rural area ever suspects Claude's dishonesty, even with his shaky memory for the Lord's Prayer and his own fake last name. (You'd think they wouldn't find it silly that he refuses to let anyone besides the screen viewers see his genitalia, but different times, different customs.) If you were hoping for suspense or a Hallmark-type lesson, this isn't the right movie. The only change that occurs is subtle: Claude feigns ignorance in ways that get Pépé to realize that he doesn't know Jews as well as he thought. At best, in the end, the old man remains ignorant but has lost his taste for ranting on that subject.
While I would hardly add a "comedy" tag, there are a few light-hearted elements herein. For example, another boy has the worst nose-picking habit you'll ever see, and his father snarks about it. The boy's sister becomes something of a precocious love interest for Claude, egged on by Pépé and forbidden by her father. None of this has much effect on the overall plot, but it adds some color, figuratively speaking.
Indeed, this is about as pleasant as a story of someone hiding from the Holocaust gets. That alone may make enough of a recommendation. Claude Berri made his directorial debut here; I think I'll check out another film or two of his in a while.
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