Almost Peaceful | 
 enlarge | Director: Michel Deville
Actors: Simon Abkarian, Zabou Breitman, Vincent Elbaz, Lubna Azabal, Denis Podalydes
Studio: FIRST RUN FEATURES
Category: DVD
List Price: $26.98
Buy New: $12.99
You Save: $13.99 (52%)
New (28) Used (12) from $3.90
Rating:  9 reviews
Sales Rank: 99754
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, Dvd-video, Ntsc, Subtitled
Languages: French (Original Language), English (Subtitled)
Rating: Unrated
Number Of Items: 1
Running Time: 94
Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.2
Dimensions (in): 7.1 x 5.4 x 0.6
MPN: D5210D
UPC: 843171005210
EAN: 0843171005210
ASIN: B0006SSR3I
Theatrical Release Date: 2002
Release Date: March 29, 2005
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Still sealed in original packaging.
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Product Description
Set during the largely unexplored period immediately following World War II, the film follows a group of mostly Jewish Parisians who attempt to restart their lives and rekindle their capacity for happiness in the shadow of unspeakable horrors. Variety called it "thoroughly charming. Sad, gentle, and funny in the best French tradition of high quality cinema." A film by Marcelo Gomes . 94 minutes, color, French w/ English subtitles.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 4 more reviews...
touching story June 12, 2008
The Roman philosopher Seneca once said, "Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end." In the movie, Almost Peaceful by Michel Deville, many Jewish Parisians face the difficulties of restarting their lives after the Second World War. Without a choice, they must learn to live a new life and forget the old. The only thing holding them back is the memory of the life they once had and the painful memory of the war. Throughout the movie, we learn of the dark memories many of the characters faced and try with the best of their ability to look towards the future rather than the past. These characters vary from age, but their memories are as painful as on another's.
The most important scene in the movie revolves around Albert's workshop. It is where the characters talk and laugh about life and where they share their painful memories. Mister Albert is a tailor who does to the best of his ability to help those in need. As the movie begins, he hires a staff of mostly Jews, in order to help them get on their feet financially. As the movie professes, he buys a painting, in which a lonely man is wandering by himself through snow holding only his valued possession, his cello. To Mister Albert, it is a symbol of hardship and hope in which he wants to pass down to future generations so that they will never forget the pains of their ancestors. Having a part of his life taken away from him, he hopes that his children will accomplish more in their lives so that they wouldn't have the poor reputation of being tailors. As he works day by day, he slowly sees the sun after a long cold storm and falls in live with his wife again. Joseph is another character who must the face the prejudice of others. In the movie, Joseph starts out as a sewing machine operator for Mister Albert. Since he was never taken to a concentration camp, he enjoys listening to the stories of the passwords Mister Albert had used during the occupation of France. As Joseph applies for his French citizenship, an inspector that arrested his parents during the war refuses to give him one. Not knowing what to say, Joseph leaves the room, but returns shortly to defy the inspector. He retells the story of how the inspector was going to take his family to the concentration camp, but was able to escape bravely without looking back. He then tells the inspector that he is free and will one day write about his courage and the hardships of the war. The character who seems to be affected by the war the most, was Charles. In the beginning of the movie, Charles is the employee who sits quietly at his desk and avoids conversation with the others. We later find out that Charles had lost his children and wife in the concentration camps and waits for them each day at the window of his apartment. When Lea approaches him and confesses her love for him, he tells her that he has no feelings for her and wants to remain loyal to his wife. As the movie closes to and end, we see a change in Charles. He becomes more open and enjoys the company of Albert's children. In the end, he tells Lea that he is planning to move to Canada or Australia in order to start a new life and forget the old. The youngest of the characters were the two orphan boys. The first time we see one of the boys, George, is when the orphan refuses to eat strawberry jam. We later find out that his parents once told him that a jar of strawberry jam is precious and that it should be saved for a time in need. When officers rushed into his house to take his parents away, he hid in a closet. After everyone was gone, he stayed in the closet for along time and when he became hungry, he found and ate the jar of jam he found next to him. The other orphan, Daniel, we meet during the end of the movie. During a picnic, he is sitting alone by himself playing around with a pocket watch. We then find out that the pocket watch had been given to him by his father just before he was taken to a concentration camp. Since then, he rewinds the watch each day without letting it stop. It is the only item that comforts him and helps him remember his parents. In the end, through all the sorrow and pain the characters faced, they finally find joy. For Mister Albert, he found joy in his family whom he loved dearly. Joseph found the courage to write about freedom, Charles found hope to open a new chapter in his life and the orphans found the joy in their sorrowful memories in the hope of being closer to their lost parents. This movie has proven once again, that after a terrible storm, there is always sunshine.
Rekindling Happiness April 29, 2008
In post World War II Europe, Europeans strived to live after the devastations of war. Many had lost their jobs, homes, and family members, making life after the war quite difficult. The French film, Almost Peaceful, by Michel Deville, shows viewers how Parisian Jews struggled to rekindle happiness after facing such harrowing experiences during the war. The Jews of this film were all affected in some way or another by the war, whether being put in concentration camps, losing loved ones, or having to live a life under cover. This movie depicts the hardships faced by the Jewish protagonists in post-war Paris and how they managed to acquire a happier lifestyle in the end.
Most people wouldn't believe that managers of tailor shops in Paris might have lived a life in hiding, relying only on secret codes and messages as his knowledge of the outside world; secret codes and messages that acted as survival guides, as they we were needed to smuggle in food, clothes, and hope. Thus is the story of Albert, one of the Jewish protagonists of the film. Albert had managed to avoid the horrors of being put in concentration camps as he had hid away from the world during the war. A friend of his had helped to hide him, along with other fortunate Jews. Albert's mistrust of Anti-Semitics even after the war is shown in the movie as he makes jokes about his wartime experience. He struggles to support his business and his family, as well as keeping everyone in his shop alive, happy, and working. Albert is a hard working father who finds his happiness when spent with family, something he was deprived of during the war.
It can be said that all of the workers in Albert's tailor shop has a story of their own. All but one of the workers in the shop are Jewish and the least understood of the group is Charles. Charles is the lonely man sitting in the corner, minding his own business and keeping quiet. Charles refuses to accept that he had lost his wife and daughters during the war (as the viewers find out that they had unfortunately perished in a concentration camp). Charles' sadness seems invisible to everyone except Lea, Albert's wife. Lea understands Charles and had fallen in love with him in the film. Lea wants to spend her time with Charles, but Charles rejects her due to the memory of his wife and daughters. Throughout the movie, Charles changes from being a quiet nobody to a wise man. Charles learns to accept his life as it is and his strained friendship with Lea. Charles happiness arrives with his change of personality. In the end, he mentions that he wanted to start a new life abroad and that he would be happy to have someone like Lea to write to him.
The youngest worker in the tailor shop is the one with the most problems. Nineteen year old Joseph is made an apprentice to the shop and is provided with the money and housing to live his simple life. Although Joseph's time at work might seem cheery, his life had been troubled since his childhood. At the tender age of fourteen, Joseph had been separated from his family as they were arrested by the secret police and forced to go to concentration camps. Joseph's final memory of his family was when they were about to board the trains; Joseph's father bade him to escape and he did...his father never looked back at his son's freedom, something Joseph had always remembered. Ironically, five years later while applying for housing, Joseph ran into the same man who had helped arrest his family during the war. Joseph's soliloquy was touching, as he promised to have his thoughts be heard by writing about his experiences. Near the end of the film, Joseph encounters little children who had gone through the same hardships as he had, like David, the boy whose father had given him a stopwatch to remind himself of his lost family. Joseph decides to stay with the children and take care of them, as he is happy being with the children of the war. Joseph's happiness prevailed at the final scene, when all is calm and he starts to write.
In Albert's shop, there are certainly a whole bunch of interesting characters, each with their own personality and problem. Take Maurice, for example, a highly talented tailor with a lonely heart. Maurice's search for love had been scarred after falling in love with his former boss's wife when he was apprenticed at a previous tailor shop at the age of fourteen. Maurice had no idea of how to control his emotions, and sometimes that would get him into trouble. Maurice's search for love had had no luck during the wartime and at his current post in Albert's shop, his search came to an end. Due to his well-paid salary, his search for love, and his loneliness, Maurice would often wander into prostitute houses. The prostitute that Maurice had been sponsoring (Simone) had changed Maurice's train of sexual thought. Simone had taught Maurice not only to love women, but life itself. By talking to him and getting him to release his pain, Simone played a big role in Maurice's life. Their friendship in bed eventually led to love in real life, as they end up making wonderful memories. When two lonely people get together in French films, it seems that all will go well (in this case, it had)...
All throughout the ups and downs of this movie, the characters each had their moments of despair, the moment of their life when everything seemed to go wrong. The war had left its mark on every Jew in the film, both in good and bad ways. If not for their hardships and struggles, happiness wouldn't have come so sweet. The human aptitude for happiness is reached at the moment of surrender, when people have corrected their wrongs and have learned to be who they are. Real happiness in the reference of this film was shown at the sweet ending, where everyone is enjoying their summer day out in the countryside with the children. By rising from the shadows of their individual fears and struggles, each character had found their own form of happiness, something that was adequately portrayed in the film, Almost Peaceful.
Inside the Characters of Almost Peaceful; by Mawra Malik April 29, 2008
In the film, Almost Peaceful by Michel Deville, we saw how different Jewish Parisians attempted to restart their lives and seek happiness after World War II. These people tried to move on in their lives, while still remembering their experiences from the Holocaust.
Albert, who is a character in the movie, was the tailing shop owner. When he was in a concentration camp, he mentioned that he would make a plan of how he would work out his tailoring. After the Holocaust, not only did he re-open his shop, but he also kept the people over there working effortlessly. Albert bought a painting from Madame Sarah only because he wanted to show his future generations what it was like back in the Holocaust. Albert and his wife Lea sent their two children to summer camps so they could lead a normal life as well.
A second example from the movie is the character Leon. He has a wife, Jacqueline, and she is pregnant with their second child. This shows that they are also moving on in their lives. Leon jokes around all the time with everyone at the tailor shop and is a great actor as well. Leon had lost many of his family members in the Holocaust and now he has the desire to have a big family. For example, when Jacqueline gives birth to their second child, Leon gets excited about his family photo (with future generations).
The third character that is trying to rekindle his capacity for happiness is Maurice. He is a very lonely man who seeks a prostitute, named Simone, to fill his sexual desires. Maurice goes to only her each time and this shows that he is looking for comfort and the warmth to get rid of his loneliness. As the movie goes on, Maurice becomes more open to Simone. For example, he took her to a coffee shop and he told her about his past life. Gradually, Maurice's relationship with Simone gets stronger and he finally expresses his feelings and all the sadness in his heart.
A last example would be the character Joseph. When he was small, his parents got arrested and he ran away. His parents didn't want to catch any attention so they didn't look back at him. Joseph went to an interview and he met the man who arrested his parents. However, Joseph wasn't scared; in fact he confronted the man. Even though Joseph felt sad about being separated from his parents, he felt happy deep inside because his parents let him free. Joseph just ran and didn't look back. Joseph tells the man that he will become a writer and write about his experience. This shows that he is ambitious to follow his dreams and brave enough to write his experience, even if it means recalling the painful truth.
The four characters Joseph, Leon, Albert, and Maurice, from the movie Almost Peaceful, try to restart their lives in different ways. Their objective wasn't to forget what happened to them during the Holocaust; they wanted to keep that in mind so that they could gather the courage to move on. After all, one's strength is more visible after they have tolerated more.
by Mawra Malik
 Another French Masterpiece March 17, 2008
This film is one of the greats among French film ,but so peaceful and so devoid of concentration wrecking 'think this way' intrusive music that one can miss the greatness in the peacefulness and submissive tragedy from people whose innermost selves were gouged and rendered down in the human abbattoir in the vile camps which Britain and America knew far more about at the time than the German people. The symbolism of the soap is a duality of cleanliness and where many of these abused jews may have ended up..as soap.
"Almost peaceful" is reasonably well covered here by less scathing critics than I but none has reached deeply into what is a superb film. . The button sequence, which perplexed one critic, was a wonderful mental picture of turning disadvantage to advantage. Within the story were many stories and many lessons.
That I think it is Leon who comes in chirping as many birds at the end of the story is so simplistic it is easy to lose the impact...watch that one again...It is a magic piece which seems to derive from the forest scene's anti-climax..as does the whole event based on camp life unobtrusively, unheralded, translated into 'now'.
"I cannot change you" 'god' tells the boy who wheezes as he breathes through the four small holes owing to the button inserted in his throat to allow him to breath at all. "no one can change you"..but on his long trip into the presence of god, against all barriers and odds, the boy has learned to whistle exactly as the birds he must follow to reach god at all. Within even that instruction is a message set, a philosophy.
The old man who found the boy sleeping in the tree roots in the resistant forest taught the boy at the outset what he must do, to use his defect to find the happiness he seeks, to find god, the only one who can change him, he now finds IS god. `He' is always there when needed, in our forest of trials and frustrations, but disguised.
This is a concept of the 'holocaust' literally the sacrifice as the jews see it, I think, as a non-jew and the whistling and warbling of Leon, and the sense of it is not immediately profound, at the end of the story, when we return to the workshop, is so deeply compelling I must watch this again soon. To find beauty in oppression and failure and to come out of it singing like a bird tells us much about the survivors, and of a better life than the one we generally choose.
I want to praise it also by condemning a whole genre of film production which is a hundred times more indoctinating of the sort of culture which is again leading us to brutal genoicide. In the current Exodus from USA into the Americas, Ireland, New Zealand, France, middle Europe and the Carribean I hope the impact of their imported subculture doesn't drag down the culture of those places as it raids their security and social framework.
If this film has a fault it is that as usual the equally large group of suffering humanity, millions of catholics and other christians, Romany's, homosexuals..including homosexuals "found" in the Gestapo and other 3rd Reich services.. mentally ill people and other such "criminals" are not represented...but then it's a story about Jews and is wonderfully produced.
In a way to me it represents camp life transposed into peacetime..maybe others didn't notice that. My criticism of its opposition..the "anti-culture" of death violence and brutality of the USA is arising because I feel almost an anger that the world is saturated with such film trash that only Australian SBS, a unique channel, and its showing of alternative films saves the soul of what is called " TV cinema" on free-to-air" TV..
The film, "Almost Peaceful" (Un monde presque paisible," or "A World Almost Peaceful."based on a novel called "Quoi de neuf sur la guerre?) " is so compelling for me it directed my mind toward condemnation of an absurd and violent 'competing' film also on TV last night with Nicholas Cage and John Travolta as stars, a film with much to condemn it and so little to praise in it including its use of children.
Watching both, I found its serenity and personality a truly blessed relief from the TV saturation of American trash, elevation of drugs and voyeuristic sex into cult status, violence, noise, military superiority fantasy, paranoic obsession with 'terorism' and its other efforts to reshape the world into a lower class uncivilised planet ruled by violence death and drugs lapped up in 'cultural cringe' places like Australia.
"Almost Peaceful", an unpresuming film, quietly beautiful and profound just blew away that typical example of American Z grade movies but if I said the audience would have been a hundredth of the movie as above I'd be close, so indoctrinated is this country.
'Almost Peaceful' is a film which elevates every part of the decency and goodness we can so easily lose in this era. It is a masterpiece and shows how good a world we could have without denying human-ness.It tells us also of resolving human situations without recourse to violence.It tells us of deep love being experience without sexual profanity.
Europe is a land mass which produces the best character study films of the last 50 years,with two American exceptions. France excells at it but Spain, Sweden, Italy and other European countries, not necessarily "states of the EU" produces an abundance of truly mature films which if not masterpieces are films of great depth without recourse to violence..
The EU countries however do the best work of all, worldwide. Masterpieces need no music not appalling noise nor short term concentration span techniques to gain and hold attention from intelligent people of all 'levels' and ages.
American films differ dramatically, they use tail chasing techniques of violence at all sensaual levels because they are worse than valueless, are damaging and destructive and appeal to the market which is mentally corrupted feeding more and more escalating corruption as might a drug addict be manipulated by a dealer. "Pornographic culture" the Mohammedans perhaps rather hypocritically call the American culture ....however, as a man who has experienced much, whilst despising much of their own so called culture I agree with that criticism.
I make that criticism because to find such quality as in this film among the wonders produced by France at such a late date ..2002..is quite a reminder of just how advanced so war ravaged Europe is,has become, has returned to its prewar brilliance culturally and in 'sympa' by comparison with a country which had every opportunity to be great but decided to be the lowest common denominator.
India also is on the rise with quality character films, I say that in fairness and Australia has produced some occasional classics of quality such as "Picnic at Hanging rock" and "Breaker Morant", the UK seems to be on the decline though its films cut up into series are still, generally exceptional works.
One could do worse than to never watch other than these quality European films and leave the garbage on the 'decharge'. Any child can only benefit from watching films such as "Le Chateau de ma Mere" and "La Glorie de mon Pere" and never watch anything but such European, French in this case, masterpieces again....and my early comments above are pertinent to that.
Anthony Clancy
goldmort@onthenet.com.au
 Broadway-style comedy of post-war Jewish-French Paris? March 16, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Back home in Paris just freed from German occupants tailor revived his family business by deploying a mostly Jewish staff rich of the Holocaust memories.
A story of relationships and survivals in post-war-second France then still infested with local anti-Semitic Nazi-Hitler supporters at all levels of bureaucracy, where family duties left space for lust and outside sex affairs.
At all merits it looks like a sort of a comedy rather than a drama of a post-war Western European Jewry returned into nothing.
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