It’s…fine. It has a few charming bits; the return of Jojo is predictable, but done well, and a funeral at the end has a sweet callback to a running sight gag. But the coda is abrupt and adds nothing, and the music isn’t catchy enough to devote an entire trompe-l’oeil sequence to.

It means well, but I think that’s part of the problem.Writer/director Christophe Barratier seems to have felt obligated to include incipient Fascism and the specter of the imminent war — when he didn’t really want to, when he only wanted to tell about the Chansonia and how a band of imperfect, sometimes-infighty friends tried to save it. But you can’t just ignore the rise of Hitler, so Barratier included it, and it felt mandatory, flat.

We’ve already seen it done, is the issue — done and done and done some more, the struggles of little artists with big hearts to save their cinema/vaudeville house/theater in interbellum or wartime France. Nothing wrong with it as a story; nothing wrong, really, either with the French national psyche’s apparent need to keep telling it as mitigation or atonement, if that’s why (or part of why) it’s so appealing. This is what art does.

Barratier should have stuck to his guns, though. I believe it’s based in part on a memoir (and the Douce/Galapiat relationship on Piaf/Leplee), but still. Tell your version, the one we haven’t heard.

Doesn’t quite pass The Truffaut Test; you might do better with actual Truffaut of this genre.

Sarah 34, Death Race 24; 9 of 24 categories completed

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