Addio, signor Haffmann

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!

Based on a stage play, this movie is a fictious story of the unsafe situation of jews in WW2 occupied Paris.

The story takes place over the period from early 1941 - not long after the Nazi's occupied part of France - until the end of 1942. It focusses on a jewish jeweler and a french family.

Since the story is based on a stage play, it takes place on a very small area: i.e. Mainly the building in which the jewelry (work)shop is located. So you will not see anything from occupied Paris. Neither will you see much military action or many WW2 props.

Overall, I think it is a basic story which does't provide or educted you on significant events that took place during WW2.

The very excellent roleplay that the actors treat you with, will make this movie still a worthwile viewing experience. Their acting is of such level that they were able to keep my attention fully caught on the events.

Concluding, I score this movie with 6.3/10, resulting in a IMDb rating of 6 stars.

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.

Exploring some of the bizarre, darker aspects of the human condition during occupation, this modern drama displays French cinema at its finest. Director Fred Cavaye brings starkly to life a story by Jean Philippe Daguerre, dealing with those shocking years of the Nazi occupation of France. The sickening French collaborators, the inhumanity of innocent families lives being sacrificed to an inhumane regime, and the uncertainty of what might remain in the years to follow.

All performances are uniformly sterling (especially Sara Giraudeau as the perplexed wife) as is the dynamic cinematography by Denis Rouden - making this above-average production riveting from beginning to its somewhat ironic finale. It's rounded off by a thoughtful music score from Christophe Julian.

At times it's perhaps a difficult watch and some plot development might seem a bit forced, but eventually offers some rich rewards. Recommended for contemporary History devotees and studies of human relationships.

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.