Customer Reviews

Monsieur Batignole (Original French Version with English Subtitles)

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The movie takes place during the German occupation of Paris. It is about an ordinary man, a butcher, who without intending to, becomes guardian of three Jewish children whom he attempts to lead to safety.

In a way, the movie reminds me of Fellini, with some of the grotesque characters and the eye for non-traditional beauty. In a way the movie reminds me of Altman with 25 things happening at once. But it is a traditional story telling film, without arty affectation. In a few scenes, it reminded me of Lasse Hallström’s My Life as a Dog with its realistic inter-child dialog.

All the characters are wonderfully flawed and memorable. It is not a particularly violent movie, but I had to stop the film every once in a while just to break the tension.

It is a period piece, but it done so naturally you never stop to think about how it was made. It just seems real. The streets are not teeming. The villains are not monsters. The heroes are not super-human. It is a completely believable story.

It is in French with subtitles.

Batignole is primary man. His little world is extremely narrow. His family and business absorb him totally. But we are in times of War (June 1942) and under these circumstances it's truly difficult to be neutral.

His son in law is a collaborationist; he maintains a very narrow link with the Germans and his way of living is very lucrative: he inquires and then denounce the presence of Jewish people in the zone. Batignole intends overlook this very unpleasant ebccause the happiness of his daughter is his main concern.

But, just when the things seem to have reached the plenitude of the good fortune, an unexpected guest will knock the door.

An emblematic film loaded of devotion and humanity, showing the heroism necessarily does not follow a determined direction or it' s predetermined by certain actions.

The last generation of French films is impregnated of creative breath and vigorous inspiration. And that's by itself it's an excellent notice.

Brilliant French wartime drama....the French are the masters of this genre and Monsieur Batignole is one of the best examples. Highly gripping, dramatic yet tender story of a mild mannered French butcher caught up in the Nazi occupation of Paris, wanting to live "under the radar" but being forced to rise to levels of bravery that he did not know he possessed when he discovers a Jewish boy hiding in his cellar. The ensuing story of Monsieur Batignole's flight to take the boy and his little cousins to safety in Switzerland is touching and beautifully developed. A wonderful, heart-warming film with outstanding performances by the lead actors.

France has mostly erased knowledge of its Vichy past, the Jew-hatred which gripped the nation, and which still oozes out from French culture today with a stink not unlike some of their best cheese. French deportation camps sending Jews to Auschwitz and elsewhere for extermination are today erased from the landscape and history books, to the point that old Vichy officials could ascend to top power, as with Francois Mitterand. Documentaries about WW-II could not be published or shown for many years, if they dared to speak plainly about how French cops helped arrest and deport Jews in freight-cars from French train stations. Photos and films showing French police and military watching meekly (or smugly with approval) as Nazi stormtroopers shoved Jews into those same freight-cars, were forbidden from publication for many years by French censors, much as Turks forbid today the exposure of their genocide against the Armenian Christians and Greeks. "Insults to French Honor cannot be tolerated" so it went, even into the 1970s. So when this little film appeared, it was important for many reasons, not the least of which was how it marked a change in French cinema, that one could now -- with such great time distance from those events -- finally address them quite openly and directly. And indeed this film does so. The hero of the film, Monsieur Batignole, must fight a war with his inner conscience, as well as with his wife and neighbors, all of whom are Jew-haters and tend to want only to "get along" with the new Nazi masters, even if it means sending their neighbors off to certain death -- and gosh, who can object when you are given their apartment and furniture as a reward for turning them in! Especially for French Nationalists, I recommend this film, if only as a bucket of cold water into stiff faces which denied such things happened. Oh they did! And Oh today they still do, as French Jews are fleeing France today in record numbers, due to growing Muslim attacks and for which the French police are, once again, standing by and doing nothing. History repeats. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

A next musical-style story from the Europe of the fascist forties of the last century to convince viewers in local good guys risking everything to make miracles while saving the Jews exterminated at spot there.

One can watch it if likes adrenaline rush initiated by run-catch & kill stories.