Sands Films Cinema: Le Vieil Homme et l’Enfant – 2 March 2021

Sands Films Cinema Club: online presentation of Claude Berri’s first feature.

Online presentation of one of the great films about childhood and life during wartime: Claude Berri’s piquant, piercing first feature film in 1967. Titled “The Two of Us” in the US and UK, this film also stands — despite its highly personal and historic milieu — as a study of a perennial generational conflict.

“He listens to the radio too much, but he’s a good man,” a grown-up warns eight-year-old Claude (Alain Cohen) of the cheery old crank the boy’s being sent off to live with. It’s 1944, the Nazis have occupied France, and Claude and his family must hide their Jewishness. In Claude’s case, he must do so even from the parents-of-friends farmers putting him up. “You’ll live like a little Catholic for a while,” Claude is instructed. Claude is sceptical: “Why doesn’t he like Jews if he’s nice?”