Word: bal
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...VIOLONS DU BAL...
...about childhood, in times like these most appear to be. Many, recently, have also concerned the German occupation during World War II. Louis Malle's Lacombe, Lucien (TIME, Oct. 14) is the most prominent among them: a steady, serious film, and vastly better than Les Violons du Bal. Both movies are about the humiliation and extermination of Jews, related through the experiences of a youthful protagonist. But all that was thoughtful in Malle's movie becomes smarmy in Les Violons du Bal-politics crushed into pastels for a Sunday painter's palette...
...film, Drach's autobiography, is given direct correspondence in the present because the director, now 42, also intercuts and dramatizes his tribulations in getting Les Violons du Bal on the screen. Drach at first appears as himself, but soon, pushed by star-hungry producers, casts Jean-Louis Trintignant in the role. Drach's wife...
There is a fulsome quality about the movie, a certain disingenuousness. Les Violons du Bal (the title translates literally as Violins at the Ball, or idiomatically-according to Drach-as Others Call the Tune) demands our sympathy with all the sanctimony of someone collecting door to door for a favorite charity. Drach grabs at the heartstrings with harpy's fingers. "Mama," says handsome little Michel, moist-eyed, "what's a Jew?" When the story threatens to go pallid, Drach drums up suspense. The episode of escape across the border could have come out of some prison-camp melodrama...
...seemed a marriage of sandals and Gucci loafers, of body odors and Bal àVersailles, of radical cheek and radical chic. The corporate merger announced last week between the Village Voice and New York magazine struck many observers as the oddest of couplings...