Un sac de billes (1975)
Directed by Jacques Doillon

Film Review

The terrifying precariousness of life in Nazi-occupied France is given a particularly sharp edge when viewed from a child's perspective in this compelling wartime drama, based on Joseph Joffo's autobiographical novel.  Un sac de billes is only the third film to be directed by Jacques Doillon and yet already we feel that we are in the hands of an auteur filmmaker of rare skill and sensitivity.  The turmoil of childhood is a theme that Doillon would return to again and again in the course of his career, and few directors handle the subject with the authenticity and delicacy that he consistently shows throughout his work.  Doillon doesn't just compel us to identify with his child protagonists, he totally immerses us in their world.  It is a viscerally moving experience he offers us, forcing us to relive that early phase of our lives when we were at our most vulnerable and fearful.

There have been many commendable films on the Holocaust but Doillon's Un sac de billes is easily one of the most stirring, mainly because it shows things from the point of view of a ten-year-old boy.  Totally bereft of sentimentality, the film offers the most honest and unromantic account of childhood, its uneven pace and abrupt editing reminding us what a confused and traumatic period of existence this is.  One minute the child protagonists are ineptly roasting a stolen chicken over an open fire, the next they are timidly inveigling their way into a brothel.  They appear happily settled in a children's camp, then they are petrified as German officers grill them and force them to account for their circumcision. For these two spirited urchins, life is an obstacle course strewn with deadly traps, and it is only by being the most convincing of liars that they avoid ending up on a train bound for Auschwitz.  Thanks to its rigorously understated approach and the astounding naturalism of the two child lead actors, Richard Constantini and Paul-Eric Shulmann, Un sac de billes is a beautifully ironic tribute to the resilience of the human spirit, and also one of cinema's most captivating portraits of childhood.

Film Synopsis

Paris, 1941.  Joseph and Maurice are two boys whose father, a Jew, owns a barber's shop.  Joseph is 10, his brother is 12, and neither understands why it is a crime to be a Jew.  One day, Joseph swaps the yellow star he is forced to wear for a bag of marbles.  When the police begin rounding up the Jews in their neighbourhood, Joseph and Maurice are sent by their father to the South of France, which is not yet under German occupation.  The boys' older brothers have already made the trip but it still proves to be hazardous and only by exercising their cunning do Joseph and Maurice reach their destination unharmed.  Even after they have made it to the Free Zone, the struggle to survive is arduous and full of dangers.  It is not long before they are captured by the Germans and narrowly escape being deported.  Joseph finds work with an old bookseller who turns out to be a staunch collaborator...