|
ALMOST PEACEFUL Send This Review to a Friend
Sensitivity is the key word in describing what French director Michel Deville achieves in his warm, close-up look at Jewish survivors in Paris in 1946. This is a period not usually examined in relation to the Holocaust, but Deville, also co-screenwriter in adapting a novel by Robert Bober, assembles characters reflecting the anxieties left by the war about the future and the emotional wounds plaguing those who lost loved ones.
The setting is an atelier, a small workshop where women’s clothes are made. The employees, mostly Jewish, work closely and get to know about each other’s lives and aspirations. Albert (Simon Abkarian) runs the operation and Léa, his wife (Zabou Breitman), is restless in their marriage. She is fixated on an employee whose wife is missing and presumed dead, and the memory of their devotion impedes his entry into a new relationship.
Joseph (Malik Zidi), a young newcomer who survived and as a child experienced the horror of having his parents taken away but was saved because they had hidden him, bristles at those who still have important jobs but collaborated in the arrest and deportation of Jews. He gets satisfaction telling off one such functionary who is obviously anti-Semitic.
One of the film’s loveliest scenes is a picnic in the country, in which we view the characters in a momentary idyllic environment. “Almost Peaceful” doesn’t have a grand plot, but glows with its understated slice-of-life insights and quietly respectful attitude toward its characters. An Empire Pictures release.
|