Pogrom Practices

By JAY COCKS

LES VIOLONS DU BAL

Directed and Written by MICHEL DRACH

Although not all French films are about childhood, in times like these most appear to be. Many, recently, have also concerned the German occupation during World War II. Louis Malle's Lacombe, Lucien (TIME, Oct. 14) is the most prominent among them: a steady, serious film, and vastly better than Les Violons du Bal. Both movies are about the humiliation and extermination of Jews, related through the experiences of a youthful protagonist. But all that was thoughtful in Malle's movie becomes smarmy in Les Violons du Bal--politics crushed into pastels for a Sunday painter's palette.

The boy hero here is a little baffled by the fear and quick violence all about him. His father, off in Spain, is never seen. His sister drops out of sight and becomes a fashion model who plays cozy with the Germans while looking for a chance to make her escape. Michel, the boy, lives with his mother and grandmother, and is subjected to playground and schoolroom humiliations because he is a Jew. His mother, trying to remain inconspicuous, changes the family name and shuttles from one apartment to another. But there is no way to avoid the pogrom except to flee the country. She sends Michel ahead, joins him later with her mother, and the three try to cross the border to Switzerland and safety.

The film, Drach's autobiography, is given direct correspondence in the present because the director, now 42, also intercuts and dramatizes his tribulations in getting Les Violons du Bal on the screen. Drach at first appears as himself, but soon, pushed by star-hungry producers, casts Jean-Louis Trintignant in the role. Drach's wife,

Marie-Josee Nat, shows up in the flashbacks, playing--nicely if unspectacularly--his mother; Drach's son David shows up as the boy Michel. The familial casting forms cozy Pirandellian arabesques, but they are merely decoration.

There is a fulsome quality about the movie, a certain disingenuousness. Les Violons du Bal (the title translates literally as Violins at the Ball, or idiomatically--according to Drach--as Others Call the Tune) demands our sympathy with all the sanctimony of someone collecting door to door for a favorite charity. Drach grabs at the heartstrings with harpy's fingers. "Mama," says handsome little Michel, moist-eyed, "what's a Jew?" When the story threatens to go pallid, Drach drums up suspense. The episode of escape across the border could have come out of some prison-camp melodrama: snarling dogs, relentless Nazis armed with machine guns, and desperate scrambles through thick woods, open fields and barbed wire.

Drach contrives to make anyone who might remain unmoved feel like a Philistine and a bigot. At the outset he resorts to the sophomore's trick of putting all possible objections into the mouths of nitwits. An antsy cameraman asks rather perceptively, "What was so special about your childhood?" Drach's answer, "It was mine," is intended to disarm, but only reinforces the question.

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