This is top-notch French popular cinema, a coming of age tale subtly interweaving themes of class and race and authentic memories, comic and musical set-pieces, star power and infectious optimism. Writer-directors Éric Toledano and Olivier Nakache have feelgood form with hits such as Untouchable (2011) and, having drawn two million French cinemagoers this summer, Just an Illusion will also reward UK audiences.
It’s 1985 in the Paris suburbs and 12-year-old Vincent Dayan (Simon Boublil) shares a flat with sardonic older brother Arnaud (Alexis Rosenstiehl), mum Sandrine (Call My Agent!’s Camille Cottin) and dad Yves (Louis Garrel). Sandrine is a secretary aiming higher in the new computer age, Yves a victim of the Eighties recession, secretly sacked from his prized junior executive job but still setting off daily with his businessman’s mac and briefcase. The block’s practical and charismatic caretaker Mr Berger (a typically roguish Pierre Lottin, pictured below) flirts with Sandrine in near-Carry On style (“Yves is not very…hands on,” he smirks), and Vincent senses his weary parents’ mutual disaffection. His own adolescent longing is meanwhile awakened by Anne-Karine (Jeanne Lamartine), his classmate in the posh house round the corner.
It’s eventually revealed that the Dayans are Jewish, with Sandrine a pied noir expelled as a child from Algeria, and Yves from Morocco. “Who are we actually?” Vincent wonders. “French, Jewish or African?” Sandrine delineates the colonial nuances that make her French and Dad, from a mere protectorate, Moroccan. As first-generation Jewish migrants, they are anyway concerned to “keep our heads down, and not make waves”. With his bar mitzvah approaching, Vincent has to mark out his own identity.
In a French equivalent to the British likes of Brassed Off, the directors apply a light touch to potentially heavy themes, whose resolution fuels their film’s effervescence. A sibling fight is shot like gritty action cinema, and secrets spark high and low farce. Vincent and his schoolfriends’ misadventures with a soft porn video rented alongside covering French classics leads them to stuff Claude Lelouche’s A Man and a Woman into the VCR when one boy’s mum comes home early, forcing them to endure the whole thing with the misty-eyed parent. Lelouch even directed a brief scene in Just an Illusion, proving its proud mainstream pedigree.
Music ranges from Imagination’s Britfunk title song to The Cure and French Eighties favourites such as Téléphone; in the standout scene, usually harried Sandrine dances at home to the Pointer Sisters’ “I’m So Excited” as if she’s in Flashdance. Yves, fleeing another futile job interview, drops his briefcase to join her, and their dammed love floods out. So often the heartthrob, Garrel’s moustachioed, stoically repressed and jealous turn here is met by Cottin’s frustrated ambition and Lottin’s brusquely sexy challenge in a comic triangle, forming the backdrop to Boublil’s first lead role as their poignantly bemused but irrepressible son.
This past France connects to its present malaise. In place of the far-right National Rally, though, there’s an SOS Racisme rally for immigrant’s son Vincent to join and find outspoken community. Toledano and Nakache draw on his adolescent surge of insight and action, and its residue in his middle-aged parents. Just an Illusion isn’t nostalgic for recent, equally fraught history, instead running on a youthful time of life’s vibrant rush, fondly remembered by its makers, and renewed with every generation.
