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The 1967 French film The Two of Us opens with the words "This is a true story but filtered through the imagination of a child." Most viewers could probably guess that even without the explanation. For the movie is infused with the idyllic quality of nostalgia but grounded in the vivid details of real life.

That life takes place in France in the latter years of the war. Claude, an eight-year-old boy, is caught trying to steal a tank from a store. He probably would've made it free except that he gets greedy and foolishly attempts to steal two tanks. Afraid of the unwanted attention, his Jewish mother and father decide to move. But Claude is caught smoking in an outhouse, and his dad wonders what he's going to do with his mischievous son. Then the bombings over Paris begin, and it's not long before the boy is being sent to live in the country.

That setting has its own set of dangers, though. He's staying with an older couple he simply calls Grampa and Grandma (though he's no relation of theirs), and Grampa (Michel Simon) is openly anti-Semitic. So Claude has to pretend to be a good Catholic boy, which requires changing his last name (which he has to pronounce correctly), memorizing the Lord's Prayer, and bathing without anyone seeing him. That's difficult at first, but soon Grampa and Claude are inseparable, as Claude tags along wherever Grampa goes. The old man tells the boy about his role in WWI, and the two listen to radio reports from England and the front while Claude sits in the older man's lap.

One of the most striking things about the movie is how director Claude Berri honestly portrays Grampa's anti-Semitism without turning him into some sort of caricature. In one scene, Claude asks how he can tell when someone is Jewish. Grampa responds that they smell bad, have hooked noses in order to smell money, flat feet to avoid the draft, and eat with their hats on. Claude amusingly responds that Grampa eats with his hat on, and Grampa rebuts with the unconvincing excuse that his is a beret. Later on, the boy turns the tables by pointing out that Grampa has many of the same characteristics that "marks" a Jew.

But Grampa is an extraordinarily likable character in other scenes. He encourages Claude to become a vegetarian so as not to eat Grampa's beloved rabbits, he tells funny stories, and he even feeds his dog with a spoon. Yet, these moments aren't designed to excuse Grampa's prejudices. Rather, they add to the roundness of his character, some of which is lovely and some of which is horrible.

That attempt to show life in all its fullness extends to the film's other plot lines (a group of bullies makes school unpalatable), but Berri, like many French filmmakers, can't help but idealize the countryside. Gathering sticks becomes a tale-filled jaunt. Sunday afternoons are set aside for outdoor picnics. As with many of our childhood memories, the days of playing outdoors are remembered as wonderfully free of bugs, heat, and humidity where children run without shoes and never stub their toe. Fortunately, Berri doesn't resort to crowd-pleasing dynamics often. The film is often delightful, but it's rarely saccharine or pandering.

The real reason to see The Two of Us, though, is to see Michel Simon, who's absolutely fantastic. While he made over 150 films from 1924 to 1975 (including L'Atalante and Boudu Saved from Drowning), he had largely stopped working when Berri approached him for the role of Grampa. His huge, boisterous performance here is amazingly nuanced. He's a force of nature as he plays with the boy and rants about the war, and his sadness over the death of his animals is powerfully subtle. Simon can be a clown when it's called for, but he never crosses the line into buffoonery, a critical element when his character's anti-Semitic views come to the fore.

If you see The Two of Us, make sure you arrive on time, as the Music Box is also screening Berri's 1963 Oscar-winning short "The Chicken." It's in the same vein as the feature, with the focus on a young boy, this time as he tries to save his beloved chicken from the cooking pot. The plot itself is rather silly, but the portrait of a boy and his loving parents is charming.  

By J. Robert Parks