Les Enfants de la chance (2016)
Directed by Malik Chibane

Film Review

With his fifth cinematic feature, director Malik Chibane recounts a remarkable story of survival against the odds set against the backdrop of one of the most shameful periods in French history.  The round up of Jews in July 1942 at the time of the Nazi occupation is an event that still haunts the collective French consciousness and cannot be revisited enough in cinema, if only to help stem the rising tide of racial intolerance in France today. The subject was recently covered in grim detail in Rose Bosch's La Rafle (2010), and this makes an effective companion piece to Chibane's film which has a much more upbeat tone.  The director first won acclaim with his first two films Hexagone (1994) and Douce France (1995) which offered a more positive portrayal of immigrants adjusting to life in modern day France than that seen in Mathieu Kassovitz's shocking La Haine (1995).  Unlike most films relating to the Holocaust, Chibane's latest screen offering is astonishingly uplifting.

Les Enfants de la chance tells the true story of Maurice Grosman who, as a pre-adolescent Jew, was saved from the death camps (unlike his family) by the happy accident of a broken hip bone.  It was whilst being treated in hospital for this injury that Grosman was diagnosed with tuberculosis, so he was fated twice by Providence and went on to live a charmed life.  After the war, he created a highly successful retail business, Celio, which specialises in fashionable off-the-peg men's clothing.  Grosman first recounted his extraordinary childhood salvation in a book that he wrote with François Taillandier in 2009, entitled N'habite plus à l'adresse indiquée, on which Chibane's film is loosely based.

Malik Chibane's habitually optimistic style of cinema makes his take on the Nazi occupation appear quite different to that seen in other films.  Rather than dwell on the horrors of the Holocaust (which are still alluded to in his film), the director chooses instead to accentuate the positive - the goodness shown by those who resisted the deportations and the friendships forged between Jews and non-Jews, in spite of the anti-Semitism that was rife in France at this time.  Les Enfants de la chance is a sentimental film but it manages to avoid the excessive off-putting mawkishness that has crept into similar films of late (notably Christian Duguay's Un sac de billes, released just over a month later).  Helped by some commendable acting (Philippe Torreton gives a particularly memorable performance as a medical man most definitely on the side of the angels) and a fairly convincing screenplay, Chibane delivers a likeable film that is sincere and poignant, although somewhat lacking in character depth and directorial flair.

Film Synopsis

In July 1942, France is under Nazi occupation.  Maurice Gutman, a 12-year-old Jewish boy, finds himself in hospital after accidentally fracturing his leg.  It is a mishap that proves to be a stroke of good fortune, as Maurice narrowly escapes the round up that leads to his entire family being arrested and deported to a German concentration camp.  If he hadn't been hospitalised, Maurice's tuberculosis would have gone unnoticed, so he has second lucky escape.  Thanks to Dr Daviel and his medical colleagues, Maurice is given a safe haven in the hospital for the duration of the occupation and manages to escape the fate of his family.  He was one of the lucky ones.  Many others were not so fortunate...