Monsieur Batignole

By PETER CALDER

Herald rating: * * * *

Gerard Jugnot, who directs and takes the title role in this disarming comedy-drama, has remarked that most French film-makers have made or end up making a film about the terrible war years in occupied France.

It's true that he's standing on the shoulders of giants like Louis Malle, and he has specifically cited Joseph Losey's 1976 film Mr Klein as an influence.

But this is its own film, which shares with Losey's only the tantalising idea of what it might have been like for a Gentile to find himself being treated like a Jew.

Jugnot is a prolific and revered comic actor in France and there are plenty of bleakly comic touches in this movie. Jugnot himself - portly, sweating and anxious - cuts a comic figure which looks like a French stereotype. But the film's caperish opening moments soon give way to a darker story.

Batignole runs a family butchery in occupied Paris. It's July 15, 1942, the day before French police began the roundup of Jews who were taken to the Velodrome d'Hiver, a sports stadium, to await deportation. The "vel d'hiv", so central to Mr Klein, is mentioned here only in passing. The film concentrates on Batignole, who profits after unwittingly helping to turn in the wealthy Jewish family in the apartment upstairs.

His unease at the fruits of his treachery turns to terror when the son of his arrested neighbours (the wide-eyed Jules Sitruk in a performance quite devoid of cuteness) turns up on the doorstep, followed not long after by a couple of his young cousins. Batignole is caught between a dimly felt sense of compassion and the danger posed by his would-be son-in-law, a greasy collaborator who is the film's closest thing to caricature, and the SS colonel (Burger), the lubricious villain of the piece.

The film seems, like the comedies of Tati, for example, possessed of a specifically French sensibility and Anglophone audiences may squirm at times at the extraordinarily risky blend of comedy and clammy drama.

At some moments it's like Hogan's Heroes, but Jugnot as director also conveys with sidelong glances the terrible poignancy of shattered lives - the sight, glimpsed in passing, of a Jewish business' van, confiscated and repainted, speaks volumes.

In the end, as the story of a man who describes himself as accidentally courageous, it is a modest and moving film.

Cast: Gerard Jugnot, Jules Sitruk , Jean-Paul Rouve, Gotz Burger Director: Gerard Jugnot Running time: 104 mins Rating: M (adult themes) Screening: Rialto, Bridgeway from Thursday