It is a truth not so universally acknowledged that a Jewish story set in one part of the world is recognisable to Jews in every other part of the world.
Take the latest and most personal film by Éric Toledano and Olivier Nakache. The French writer directors have combined their respective backgrounds to convey life growing up in a Sephardi family in the suburbs of Paris during the 1980s, just as as they did.
Married couple Yves (Louis Garrel) and Sandrine (Camille Cottin) play first- generation immigrants from Morocco and Algeria just as the directors’ parents were. (Toledano’s were Moroccan, Nakache came from Algeria).
In their high-rise apartment – this being a French film the interiors still look spacious and light – their two sons are squeezed into the flat’s second bedroom. At 12 years old and with his barmitzvah fast approaching, Vincent (a very promising debut by Simon Boublil) is confined to the corners of a room, which is like sleeping in the mind of his older, cooler, brother Arnaud (an assured Alexis Rosenstiehl). The older teenager is obsessed with English indy pop and has plastered the shared walls with posters of New Order, The Cure and others.
It is Vincent’s story that places the film firmly in the rites-of-passage category. The tender and meandering plot is largely framed by the boy’s big day in synagogue. Hebrew lessons with his Chasidic rabbi are thrown off course when the soft porn film that he and his school mates managed to procure from the local video shop (an embarrassing transaction unavailable to comedies set in the 2000s) appallingly goes missing when the chess set in which Vincent has hidden the film is loaned by his dad to the rabbi. And like many a rites-of-passage film first love is also a theme. The girl Vincent falls for has contempt for her racist father. Vincent gallantly offers to piss him off by being her first Arab-Jewish boyfriend.
Yet the emotional heart of the film really belongs to the parents. Yves is so embarrassed that he has been made redundant from his cherished status as an “executive” that he gets dressed every morning in his suit and raincoat to keep his boys from knowing he is unemployed. Meanwhile, Sandrine has a chance to get a promotion if she can get her head around this new piece of kit called a computer that has been delivered to her home.
The scene in which Yves upbraids his older son over his bad exam results while at the same time asking to borrow some cash is handled with deliciously understated delicacy. Garrel and especially Cottin, the Call My Agent star who is soon to lead the movie version of the comedy series, are both superb. They generate a beautifully observed marital chemistry about them.
This is a touching and often very funny take on the rough and tumble of family life. The nostalgia hits do not only come from wide collars, angular cars and chunky hi-fi systems. One of the biggest is from an anti-racism concert where the pop industry welcomes Jews as much as every other minority. But the truth all diaspora Jews will recognise is delivered by the scene in which Vincent confides to his mother that he doesn’t know how to think of himself.
“Are we French, Jewish or African?” he asks.
“We are all at once,” replies his mother.
Just an Illusion
Cert 12A
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