Un sac de billes (2017)

Directed by: Christian Duguay | 113 minutes | drama | Actors: Dorian Le Clech, Batyste Fleurial, Patrick Bruel, Elsa Zylberstein, Bernard Campan, Kev Adams, Christian Clavier, César Domboy, Ilian Bergala, Emile Berling, Jocelyne Desverchère, Coline Leclère, Holger Daemgen, Fred Epaud, Michaël Erpelding, Pierre Kiwitt , Jean-Baptiste Navarre, Vincent Nemeth, Luc Palun, Lucas Prisor, Candide Sanchez, Michael Smadja, Isabelle Ziental

The year is 1944. The Jewish brothers Maurice and Joseph (Jojo) live with their parents and older brothers in Nazi-occupied Paris. When the ground gets too hot under his Jewish feet, Father Roman splits the family and sends each of them on a journey. Maurice and Jojo take the train south, hoping to reach free Nice and reunite with the family there. The brothers soon realize that they need money, cleverness and luck to do this. A lot of luck.

‘Un sac de billes’ (bag of marbles) is the second film adaptation of Joseph Joffo’s autobiography of the same name. The film is a cross between serious war drama and adventurous youth film, a bit like the Dutch War Winter. The tone is always nuanced, the good or bad here is not in the systems but in the individual. We see good and bad French, nasty and friendly Germans. We do not encounter bad Jews, by the way, but that is justifiable.

‘Un sac de billes’ is first and foremost a romantic adventure story, and that’s what it looks like. Paris in the snow, an old steam locomotive over a high bridge in the French mountains, the picturesque Vielle Ville of Nice, the equally picturesque French countryside. All that 19th-century beauty makes the film more like ‘Alone in the world’ than ‘Schindler’s List’, partly because the plastic gore of the war is left out of the picture.

The movie is exciting. It is clear that Joseph will do well (otherwise he would never have written his autobiography), but how the rest of the family fare remains a question for a long time. The brothers go from one predicament to another, if not in a German headquarters or in a family of anti-Semitic French collaborators. Exciting, but we’ve seen it just a little too often, in all those other war movies.

The acting is fine, with veterans like Elsa Zylberstein and Patrick Bruel and the cute lads Batyste Fleurial and Dorian le Clech as Maurice and Jojo. The images are pleasing to the eye, the music melancholic and moody. Enough reasons to watch this movie. Not a high-quality work of art, there are too many clichés for that and the film tends too often to the sentimental. But for a relaxed evening out, this is a great choice.