Le Vieil homme et l'enfant (1967)
Directed by Claude Berri

Film Review

Rated by François Truffaut as one of the best films about the Nazi Occupation of France, Le Vieil homme et l'enfant represents a spectacular cinematic debut for the young film director Claude Berri, his first full-length film (and arguably his best film).  Drawing on his own intimate wartime experiences, Berri skilfully narrates a warm and touching tale of friendship between an old man and a young boy, set in France during its darkest days in the Second World War.  It's an auspicious start to a film career and the film's author would certainly make his mark on French cinema.  In addition to directing over twenty films, including the enormously successful dyptich Jean de Florette / Manon des sources (1986), Berri was also one of France's most important film producers, with almost seventy credits to his name in this capacity.

Le Vieil homme et l'enfant is a simple, understated yet very effective film, both poignant and strikingly naturalistic in style, with none of the laboured sentimentality and artistic excesses that would mar some of Berri's later films.  Although it was made more than twenty years after the end of the war, it was the first French film to tackle the thorny issue anti-Semitism head-on, and it does so with extraordinary sensitivity and compassion, not to mention a certain amount of humour.  By showing us the absurdity of prejudice and bigotry from a child's perspective, it deserves to be considered one of the most potent and engaging films about racism.  It also provides a bleak commentary on the Occupation, a time when France was ruled by an anti-Semitic government which actively collaborated in the Holocaust, and when most French people were antipathetic towards Jews, or at least indifferent to their fate.

The film is also significant in that it afforded Michel Simon, one of the great monstres sacrés of French cinema, his first major film role in over a decade.  After an accident which left him partly crippled in the 1950s, the actor was reduced to playing minor parts for several years - a sad state of affairs for an actor who, in the 1930s and 40s, had been one of most highly regarded in France.  Le Vieil homme et l'enfant sees Simon's long-awaited return to form, in a part worthy of his talents and which won him the Best Actor award at the Berlin Film Festival in 1967.  Michel Simon's portrayal of the old man Pépé is one of his most memorable and heart-rending - in spite of the fact that our sympathy for his character is constantly challenged by his racist utterances.  The on-screen rapport between the elderly Michel Simon and his adorable young co-star Alain Cohen is nothing less than pure magic.

Film Synopsis

In 1943, with France under Nazi occupation, a Jewish couple decide to send their young son, Claude, to live in the country, where they hope he will be safe from arrest.   Claude is placed in the care of the ageing Catholic parents of a family friend -  Pépé and Mémé.   The old man Pépé takes an immediate liking to Claude and begins to indoctrinate him in his anti-Semitic views, not realising that Claude is a Jew...