Adiós, señor Haffmann

Flawless work by the cast make this watch an emotion inducing one. It's a people story full of artistic expressions. Great visuals to portray how lives changed. A chronicle on what people saw, felt and had to live through in a time of death. Farewell Mr. Haffmann is for the keen minds to revisit history and admire the strange ways of human mind the fountain of persona.

Movies on Holocaust are always very emotional but this one is even more loaded with all kinds of emotions. The characters just jump out of the screen and become a part of your life too. It takes a very good script, an excellent direction and larger-than-life actors to achieve that.

To set the scenes appropriately, extract the best from your actors and reduce the background music - make the audience they're a part of the movie too - simply brilliant!

It's a drama set in Paris, France, beginning in May 1941 and extending into late 1942. It follows the story of a Jewish-owned jewelry shop after the Germans have taken over Paris.

Joseph Haffmann (Daniel Auteuil) is a successful middle-aged jeweler of great skill. When he sees signs stating all Jews need to report for a census, he sends his wife and three children to a safer area in Vichy France. François Mercier (Gilles Lellouche) is Haffmann's recently-hired French assistant. Mercier is an unhappy man who could not serve in the army because of a bad leg that requires a brace. He is also despondent because, after several years of marriage, he cannot have children with his wife, Blanche (Sara Giraudeau). The doctors have indicated Blanche is healthy, so François blames himself.

Haffmann concocts a scheme to save his business during the German occupation by "selling" it to Mercier, with the understanding he will repurchase the shop after the war. He promises to help Mercier then set up his own shop. Mercier agrees though Blanche is skeptical. However, Haffmann is foiled in his efforts to follow his family and is forced to hide with the Merciers, who have already moved into Haffmann's home above the shop.

The film then follows the difficult changes in the relationship between Haffmann and the Merciers, especially since a German Commandant named Jünger (Nikolai Kinski) becomes a major customer of the store. Relationships deteriorate until a surprise allows for a righteous ending.

"Adieu Monsieur Haffmann" is perhaps the best film I've seen this year. The acting, direction, and cinematography, are all excellent. The righteous ending seems a little improbable and subtracts my rating from a 10 to a 9. The viewer gets into the souls of the three principal characters. The film is derived from a play, so almost all the action takes place in one building. Highly recommended.

As revisionism is running rampant in Europa , films such as "l'homme de la cave " (also feat Auteuil) and "Adieu Monsieur Haffmann" are deeply appropriate to our times,appropriate in a way that recent works like "une jeune fille qui va bien " are not.

The depiction of occupied Paris in those darker hours of the twentieth century is uncompromising : the milice and the collaborators, the gendarmes -the story takes place in 1941,the year before the the roundup of Jews in the Paris Velodrome d'hiver-, checking the identity papers , the piles of informers' letters in the offices , the jewels stolen from the deported -where do they come from ? Asks the jeweller hidden in his cellar :the moment when he discovers among them his old friend's pendant is harrowing- , women sleeping with the enemy to get them ,the growing terror of the Jews : although he does not know the existence of the concentration camps ,the jeweller asks himself :"they are going to work in Germany? These old men???"

Some people will blame the director for showing the warts and all of the occupied France: the characters are either afraid (the butcher/smuggler) or profiteers , a la "Lacombe Lucien ": what's the matter,if he's not part of the milice ? Like Louis Malle's hero,he "protects "a Jew ,but,slowly and inexorably, he realizes he can own the workshop and drink champagne in the parties with the German ; like Joseph Losey's "Monsieur Klein" who would buy the Jews' valuable paintings for a song ,the employee understands his time may have come: this is a huis clos , most of the action taking place in a workshop or in a cellar where the owner becomes ,little by little, a prisoner ."I'll pay you what you used to give me "(when you were the boss); no humiliation is spared the jeweller : as his former employee is sterile, he wants him to get his wife pregnant .

Playing with fire may be dangerous : note the similarities -on a smaller scale- with the ending of "Monsieur Klein"!

Extremely well acted by Gilles Lellouche as the unscrupulous employee,Sara Giraudeau as the bewildered wife ,and Daniel Auteuil who perhaps needed this role to make up for the hateful hero of "l'homme de la cave" :he's another "man in the cellar" after all.