Israeli moviegoers are invited to spend time with the Dayan family when the new French movie, Just An Illusion, opens around the country today. I really hope that they do.
The movie was made by the longtime directing duo, Éric Toledano and Olivier Nakache, best known for their movie, The Intouchables, a crowd-pleasing dramedy about a bitter wheelchair-bound older man (Francois Cluzet) and his young, sexy caregiver (Omar Sy), which has been remade around the world. It was one of the biggest successes in French film history.
They have made more than a dozen other films, including the brilliant drama about people on the autism spectrum, The Specials, as well as the French adaptation of the classic Israeli series, Betipul, called En Therapie.
They specialize in movies that keep audiences entertained from start to finish, but are also genuinely moving, as well as very funny. Just An Illusion may be their finest film yet, and here’s the best part: It’s their first really personal work.
While they can capture the souls of all different kinds of characters, with Just An Illusion they have mined their own lives to tell the story of a Jewish family in a Paris suburb in 1985.
Jewish identity trying to fit into mainstream culture
The mother, Sandrine (Camille Cottin of Call My Agent!), is an Algerian immigrant, while their father, Yves (Louis Garrel, who starred in An Officer and a Spy, Godard Mon Amour, and many other films), is from Morocco.
The parents have a strong Jewish identity but are trying to fit into mainstream culture, and their children are also looking for their place. While the parents are a key presence in the movie, it’s really the coming-of-age story of their 12-year-old son, Vincent (Simon Boublil, in his movie debut).
At times, it brings to mind the great French coming-of-age drama, Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, and similar to that movie, it shows you the world from the adolescent’s point of view. But Vincent is lucky enough to live in a kinder, gentler, if still challenging environment than Truffaut’s hero. The movie is also funnier and more light-hearted, although the central issues and tensions of adolescence have a core commonality.
Just An Illusion takes its title from the soulful, funk classic by the group Imagination, which is Vincent’s favorite song, and it’s part of a soundtrack of ’80s hits from around the world, including Eye in the Sky by the Alan Parsons Project, Inbetween Days by The Cure, I’m So Excited by the Pointer Sisters, and Getaway by Earth, Wind & Fire, and is available as a Spotify playlist.
The title was chosen for a reason, and the chorus of Just An Illusion resonates throughout: “Could it be that… it’s just an illusion/Putting me back in all this confusion?” and underscores Vincent’s dilemmas.
We see in the early scenes that he has huge fights with his brother, Arnaud (Alexis Rosenstiehl), who is about to finish high school and who is a strong, charismatic guy, making huge amounts of money selling bootleg cassettes of rock classics to his friends. The shyer, more insecure Vincent struggles to feel at home in even a small corner of the room they share.
Vincent is also dismayed at the fighting between his parents, who have all the typical struggles of any young couple, over career vs family, and much more. We see how the dejected Vincent, kicked out of his room by his brother and distressed by his parents’ screaming fight in the living room, feels he has nowhere to be himself.
This sense of displacement comes just as he is trying to figure out who he is. He has a huge crush on Anne-Karine (Jeanne Lamartine), the girl he is assigned to do a school project with, and he is also busy studying for his bar mitzvah with a rabbi and trying to understand the mysteries of sex by renting porn video cassettes with his friends.
There is so much in the film that is very funny, but describing the jokes would be the worst kind of spoiler. We have seen similar stories, but Toledano and Nakache are able to bring real laughs and a light, fresh touch to it. Their style is so accomplished that it all flows easily, but that effect is much harder to achieve than it seems.
The movie illustrates the tagline for another quirky dramedy, Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums: “Family isn’t a word, it’s a sentence,” and shows how the people who make you the angriest can also be the ones who love you the most. The parents, who can be self-absorbed and childish themselves, are also fully realized human beings.
We root for Sandrine to succeed in her word-processing course so she can move on from being a secretary. We also sympathize with Yves, whose soul-numbing corporate job is a source of pride for him, and who is ashamed when he is laid off.
Every role is perfectly cast
In the great tradition of the director Jean Renoir, whose classic Rules of the Game features the line, “The awful thing about life is this: Everybody has their reasons,” we see that these sometimes petty, sometimes unfair parents have their reasons, and we learn what they are. The cast is uniformly excellent, and Boublil manages to be convincingly charming and awkward in the lead. Every role, down to the smallest ones, is perfectly cast and each actor makes an impression.
The family’s Jewish identity is at the core of much of the story, and making a movie that puts Jews front and center in a French movie in this time of rising antisemitism requires courage and should not be taken for granted. I have a son on the autism spectrum, and these directors have been my heroes since they made their film The Specials.
Just An Illusion has deepened my respect for them. For decades, they have made movies about fictional characters who are very different from themselves, like the debt-ridden hustlers of their previous film, A Difficult Year.
It would have been so easy for them to have taken out the Jewish elements and still told a coming-of-age story, but they stayed faithful to their own experience - Toledano’s family is from Morocco, and Nakache’s from Algeria - and the movie is dedicated to the memory of their fathers, who passed away during the filming.
There were moments when it seemed the film would go a little deeper than it does. But so many coming-of-age films in fairly mundane settings are marred by the seriousness with which the heroes take their fleeting adolescent travails that I was pleased Toledano and Nakache did not take this route.
By bringing us inside a family we love to spend time with, the directors lead us to empathize with them, and we feel each character’s pain and joy, particularly Vincent’s. I can’t remember the last time I felt so sorry when a film ended, and that’s probably the best compliment I can pay to any movie.