Does anyone helpfully inform a family member that they are going “out” anymore? Maybe not, but Just an Illusion remembers when that was all the detail a parent required. This French movie about the run up to a boy’s bar mitzvah is the kind of gentle, low-stakes story the entire family can get behind. It is largely a nostalgia piece, and not that there’s anything wrong with that, but its depiction of the level of freedom a thirteen-year-old boy enjoyed in 1985 will leave modern teenage jaws on the floor.
The Dayans are a family of four. Mother Sandrine (Camille Cottin) is studying computer science in hopes of getting a promotion. Father Yves (Louis Garrel) has lost his job but is desperately keeping up appearances as part of his search for work. Older son Arnaud (Alexis Rosenstiehl) is so obsessed with new-wave music he has kind of abandoned his studies for a successful business selling bootleg cassettes. Younger son Vincent (Simon Boubil) has his Hebrew studies to do in addition to the rest of his schoolwork, but he doesn’t have the time. He has fallen in love! Her name is Anne-Karine (Jeanne Lamartine), her wealthy parents are unpleasant, and at first she ignores him, despite them being meant to do a school project together. She only starts paying attention to Vincent once she realises he’s Jewish, which would really irritate her dad. Both Sandrine and Yves were born in north Africa and expelled from their home nations to France as children, which Vincent cheerfully informs Anne-Karine makes him an Arab as well. Even more irritating! Almost as irritating as having to share a bedroom with a bossy older brother, or having a dad who likes to give really boring advice about growing up, or a mom who handles her stress by blasting The Pointer Sisters and dancing around the house.
But it’s not just that Vincent takes public transport to and from Anne-Karine’s house by himself after dark. He and his gang of friends have managed to filch a ‘dirty movie’ from the local video shop, but to have the great experience of actually watching it requires a lookout during the brief window of time one friend is home alone and another friend can swipe his own family’s VCR. The lookout fails and instead the friend’s mother (Giorgia Sinicorni) comes home to discover four pre-teen boys raptly watching black-and-white romantic drama A Man and a Woman. So what is a mom surrounded by young cinema appreciators to do but plop herself amidst them on the sofa and merrily chat about how moving she finds it?
Writer-directors Éric Toledano and Olivier Nakache have made a charming and funny movie for the entire family. The focus is largely on Vincent, but we get little glimpses of Anne-Karine’s home life, as well as Sandrine navigating her office and Yves’ depressing search for work. The sequence where Yves shows up for an interview wearing a black suit and tan trench-coat, only to be shown into a waiting room full of men dressed in black suits and tan trench-coats, makes it clear there’s a big world out there of which Vincent knows very little. His parents, and even Arnaud, love him very much and have a pretty good idea of what’s going on in Vincent’s head, but they are all preoccupied with their own problems and don’t think they need to worry.
For the most part, they don’t. Vincent is a good kid despite being thirteen; the shenanigans he and his mates get up to are kid stuff and his infatuation with Anne-Karine is pure puppy love. He can move around the neighbourhood in safety because all the neighbors know him, and the building super Étienne (Pierre Lottin) misses absolutely nothing. It’s the kind of community that sulky teens don’t appreciate but parents do, it taking a village and that. The Dayans are in money trouble but not emotional trouble, not at all, and even as Sandrine works too much and Yves not enough and Étienne comes over too much and Arnaud sneaks out too much and Vincent moons about after Anne-Karine instead of practicing his Torah reading.
The big finale involves a French anti-racism concert by the band Téléphone in June 1985, a real concert with the cultural footprint in France that Live Aid had in the English-speaking world, and the overall soundtrack is largely defined by Arnaud’s taste for British bands like Joy Division and The Cure. (The title is from a song by the British ‘post-disco’ band Imagination.) The problems here aren’t particularly serious, but they have to be taken seriously, because happiness can’t be taken for granted. But sometimes the solutions for these problems are just so foolish you can’t take them seriously, either. Costume designer Isabelle Pannetier must have especially enjoyed creating the badly dyed jacket Yves gives Vincent for a present.
But when you’re a kid, not having the right jacket or the girl you like maybe not liking you back IS the end of the world. Just an Illusion is sympathetic to these childish problems without ever becoming childlike, and that means this is perfect for family movie night.
One final thing: the French Wikipedia page for this film has a detailed list of anachronisms, including one about the film the boys try to watch, which is a commitment to pedantry we can only applaud.
Just an Illusion (Juste une illusion) is now in limited theaters.
Learn more about the film at the IMDB site for the title.
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