A Girl and a Gun: A Little Gem

June 09, 2005

A Little Gem

It was pretty hard to take a film away from Michel Simon, the great French actor first seen on the screen in 1924 and in more than a hundred films over the next fifty years. But Claude Berri did it in his first feature, The Two of Us (Le vieil homme et l'enfant--The Old Man and the Child, 1967). Simon's best roles tended to dwarf the films themselves because the man was so outsized, physically, emotionally, vocally, and even Renoir had trouble making us remember much about Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932) beyond Simon's work in the title role. Simon was in his early seventies when he did this film, and he attacks his part with all the energy of a man half the age and all the canniness of one who's been perfecting his craft all those years. Berri's work, however, was a fully realized work of art with an astounding nine-year old named Alain Cohen as the child, a setting (German-occupied France, 1943-44) that raised large moral issues, and beautiful ensemble playing. Simon's character is important, but also only one part of a picture of la France profonde sketched in with great skill and attention to detail, all in only eighty-six minutes. For instance, the schoolroom scenes alone go a long way to convincing us that the peasant youths being glorified by the Vichy regime were for the most part ignorant brutes.

The Langman family (the surname with which Berri was born) is Jewish, and Claude is an only child--loved deeply by both parents, but rambunctious, given to acting first and thinking second, an impulse I am told is common at that age although of course I never indulged myself in it. He is constantly in trouble (fights, shoplifting, that sort of thing), which brings public attention to the family, precisely what they do not want just as the round-ups of Jews escalate. The family moves from town to town, but Claude keeps it up, and the father is driven to distraction. When Allied bombing begins to follow them into the provinces, the safety factor is only made worse. A sympathetic landlady has parents in their sixties who live in the deep countryside and are willing to take the boy in. But there is a complication: her father is a right-wing die-hard, a supporter of Pétain (he claims to have fought under the Marshal at Verdun), a man who identifies France as having four "natural enemies: the English, always! The Jews, the Freemasons, and the Bolsheviks." So Claude changes his last name, learns the Lord's Prayer, and is instructed never to show his "birdie" (circumcised).

It turns out the Pépé (Gramps) is politically as advertised, but also a good deal else: he loves animals, and most especially his aging dog, Kanou, to the point of being a vegetarian; is playful, a fount of goofy old songs, embroiders every story about his exploits to make them more entertaining, loves nothing better than a good laugh, and for all that the Jewish slurs never stop, protective of Claude. The boy suffers them with difficulty for a while, but figures out a way to get even that is just right for a clever nine-year old, all the while keeping his secret.

After a year, the Allied invasion at Normandy begins, and Pépé mourns--in part, because it will send the Marshal and his authoritarian regime packing; in part, because it coincides with Kanou's demise; and in part, because the end of the war will mean that Claude will return to his parents. Which is of course just what happens. They come to pick him up, and the sadness in Pépé and his wife is nearly overwhelming: someone who had become essential has been taken out of their lives. But it is Berri's final touch, which has actually been coming for a long time but still catches us unprepared, that the departure is not accompanied by any revelation of Claude's Jewishness. It's become irrelevant, and the movie's fundamental tact and decency reside in sparing us the sort of all-men-are-brothers speech which every Hollywood scriptwriter surely has in a file drawer. We leave the theater loving Claude and Pépé the more for valuing what they have over anything else.

Berri went on to much greater fame as the director of Manon of the Spring (1986) and Jean de Florette (1987), among other, much bigger films, but I don't think he ever surpassed this one. There is a lovely little appreciation by Truffaut here, worth your time. The Two of Us finishes a short run at New York's Film Forum today, and there will be brief screenings in San Francisco, Seattle, and Chicago; check the Rialto Films site for dates and theaters. Alas, there is no DVD, which is a crime I hope Rialto will rectify as soon as possible.

June 09, 2005 at 02:41 PM | Permalink

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A Girl and a Gun

June 09, 2005

A Little Gem

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