Cast: Simon Boubil, Louis Garrel, Camille Cottin Review by Carol Allen
Vincent (Simon Boubil) lives with his family in a suburb of Paris in 1985. He’s approaching his 13th birthday. He shares a bedroom with his elder brother (Alexis Rosenstiehl) and they fight all the time over the space. Their parents Sandrine and Yves (Camille Cottin and Louis Garrel) are fighting all the time too. And Vincent has fallen in love with Anne-Karine (Jeanne Lamartine), a girl at school, who at first treats him with indifference.
It’s some time into the film before we discover Vincent’s all important cultural inheritance. His parents were immigrants from Morocco in the sixties. His mother is Jewish, his father Arab. So that 13th birthday means the all important bar mitzvah. At one point a confused Vincent asks his mother, “What are we – French, Jewish, Arab?” Answer – well all three. And this is when the story gets tougher, as Anne-Karine’s father, with whom she is in conflict, is a racist. So having a boyfriend who’s both Arab and Jewish is really going to piss him off, much to her delight.
The story is created from the personal memories of the joint writer/directors of their own experiences at that age. They too are of mixed Jewish and North African parentage, and as a result the story has the feeling of truth. We’re not talking a politically heavy treatment though. Olivier Nakache an Éric Toledano recollections as used in the film also include lots of the music of the time and their favourite films, most particularly Un Homme et Une Femme, a classic from the sixties, which they obviously loved as boys in the eighties.
As Vincent, Boubil in his film debut is a delight. He has expressive and often wistful eyes and is a natural actor. The acting throughout is first class, particularly Rosenstiehl as Vincent’s good-looking but annoying brother and Cottin and Garrel as a stressed couple trying to cope with a difficult period in their marriage. I should also mention the lively and comic relationship between Yves and Pierre Lottin as Berger, the janitor of the building, who delights in fixing all those practical matters in life like blocked sinks and so on. which Yves is incapable of, much to his chagrin and his wife’s appreciation.
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