The Two of Us

A cheerful, warm, funny and charming film about antiSemitism? The Two of Us is that happy anomaly, thanks to the performances of two outstanding character actors: a 73-year-old man and a nine-year-old boy.

The boy (Alain Cohen) is the son of a Jewish couple living in the occupied France of World War II, when being inconspicuous was the best hope for avoiding the concentration camp. But it is hard for a high-spirited nine-year-old not to be noticed. For the sake of safety, he is packed off to live with the peasant parents of one of his family's friends, and becomes a counterfeit Catholic equipped with a Christianized name, the Lord's Prayer, and strict instructions not to let anyone see that he has been circumcised.

The old man (Michel Simon) is the peasant patriarch--a ramshackle curmudgeon who feeds his doddering dog with a fork, refuses to eat the rabbits that are mainstays of the family wartime diet, worships Marshal Petain, and fervently believes that Jews are responsible for most of the woes of mankind. The story concerns the deepening love of man and boy for each other, in a world neither of them understands.

Writer-Director Claude Berri tells it simply--without jerking a tear, hoking a climax, or ringing in the alarums and excursions that a wartime setting has ready at hand. Michel Simon plays the ancient in a triumph of humorous, humane acting--turning a Sunday lunch into a bibulous burlesque, hectoring his family, grumping at the BBC, and lecturing his little friend on some of the ways to tell a Jew ("They smell bad"). In his first movie role, young Alain Cohen survives country living and the reality of imbecile anti-Semitism with the help of two sharp eyes, an impish grin, and a pair of the most perkily prominent ears in France.

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