Claude Miller’s adaptation of an autobiographical novel by Philippe Grimbert chronicles more than a half-century in the lives of a family of French Jews, working its way forwards and backwards from its postwar starting point: the weakling son of athletic parents, taking refuge in fantasies of an adept fraternal alter ego, and of his parents’ idealized earlier lives. (In a reversal of the norm, the later years are shot in black-and-white, for easy differentiation.) That’s a lot of ground to cover in only an hour and three-quarters. And although the periods of 1955, 1962, and 1985 seem involving enough when we’re in them, the years before and during the Occupation — when the truth of the parents’ earlier lives comes to light — decisively dominate the action, and concentrate our attention, to such extent that the other periods begin to feel in retrospect a little like dead weight. The truth of the parents’ past is of course very unlike the fantasy. They meet as in-laws at the future father’s wedding, the mother at that time married to the bride’s brother: the look in the groom’s eye at First Sight of his soon-to-be sister-in-law tells us he’d be willing to swap on the spot. Then come the Nazis; and simultaneous with the slow-boil adulterous passion, the film probes the complexities of anti-Semitism, even among Jews. All aspects — the time shuffle, the fleeting fantasy, the engulfing history and politics, the microscopic intimacy and sensuality, not neglecting a silently suffering lesbian masseuse — are handled with delicacy and finesse, straight through to the ironic and touching epilogue in a pet cemetery. Cécile de France, Patrick Bruel, Ludivine Sagnier, Julie Depardieu, Mathieu Amalric. (2007) — Duncan Shepherd
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