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Can't Miss It: Weekend Edition Nov 20-22
When we looked at tonight's SIFF Cinema schedule, what first caught our eye was the first part of the double feature: 10 Years of Rialto Trailers. Thinking it would be a great way to figure out which noir films we should see during the rest of the festival, and get a crash course in the genre, we decided to check it out. Plus, we love trailers.
But in preparing to write this preview -- which we knew we couldn't hang on a 20-minute montage of previews, even if it includes one for the original Godzilla -- we read up on tonight's main feature, The Two of Us (Le Vieil Homme et l'enfant or literally: The Old Man and the Little Boy), and realized we were meant to see this flick.
The Two of Us is a story of a young Jewish boy in France sent to live in the countryside during the Nazi occupation of France. According to the synopsis, he winds up with a family whose patriarch is a rabid anti-Semite and touching hilarity ensues.
Reading that, we're expecting something a bit sappier than we'd choose for a noir festival. Even so, after last week's Imaginary Witness, a documentary examining Hollywood's reaction to the Nazi atrocities, we're looking forward to a first-hand (albeit fictionalized) account of life as a Jew in occupied France. (Director Claude Berri was sent to the French countryside himself during the war.) We're pretty fascinated by the Holocaust, but considering how culpable so many French people were during the occupation, it should be an interesting take.
The reviews we found (including one from its original 1968 release) all gave the movie high marks. Reviewers loved star Michel Simon as the old man saying, "the general impression is that of an immense, thoughtful, warmhearted, and aquatic geological formation." Even the nine-year old apparently does his job "with a wonderful balance of gravity and mischief."
It also doesn't hurt that Berri directed and wrote one of our all-time favorite films, Jean de Florette, which, when we saw it on a small television, without subtitles, in the Paris apartment of our best friend's uncle, when we were 15, and could barely speak a word of French, floored us.
There's a clip of The Two of Us on YouTube, but it's all in French with no subtitles. 10 Years of Rialto Trailers and The Two of Us plays Monday, Jan 28 at SIFF Cinema at 7 pm. Get tickets online.
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