The Two of Us is one of those Criterion DVDs from their middle period that hardly anybody ever references or talks about any more these days, as far as I can tell. In fact, it's so precisely "middle period" that its spine number is exactly one-half the number of the most recent release in the Collection, Moonrise Kingdom, #776. So how about that, what a coincidence... Despite being released in 2007, the DVD-only title has yet to broach the extremely modest tally of 200 entries into users of the company's "My Criterion" feature on their website. That's a ridiculously low number, as is obvious to those of us who scrupulously track these things. (By comparison, as of today, Spine # 387, the recognized classic La Jetee/Sans Soleil, is claimed by nearly 2100 collectors, while the more obscure and polarizing film WR: Mysteries of the Organism, #389, has accrued just over 500 declared owners.)
There are a number of reasons that this film has fallen off the radar of today's most active, or at least verbose, cinephiles. For starters, the director Claude Berri, despite having a distinguished enough career within the French film industry, never came close to achieving auteur status, despite a close personal and professional relationship with Francois Truffaut. Nor does he appear to have any kind of a significant following among the younger set of emerging movie buffs. After he came to prominence and put the comedic, sentimental tone of his early films behind him, Berri's preferred style was to create visually sumptuous, respectably decorous dramas for grown-ups based in historic situations that deliver an emotive, satisfying resolution - a clear "moral to the story" that pleases the mass audience. The Two of Us is his only directorial entry in the Criterion lineup. Along that line, he does boast CC credits as producer of Roman Polanski's Tess and Abdellatif Kechiche's The Secret of the Grain. When you look up his IMDb profile, you'll see that he produced nearly three times as many films as he helmed. His acting and writing credits also outnumber his work as director. The two films that earned him the most enduring fame, Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring, are both very good, potentially Criterion-worthy titles, each starring Yves Montand in some of his best work, but they were just issued in the USA on Blu-ray by a different company earlier this year, so I won't get my hopes up.
So the diffusion of Berri's talents in so many different aspects of the film industry may perversely account for why he's been somewhat neglected today. But as for the film itself, The Two of Us really is such a nice, unassuming and ultimately heartwarming tale that it's kind of no surprise that the usual Criterion fan base hasn't generated much word of mouth to draw others in or even provoke their curiosity. As much as I found to admire in cinematographer Jean Penzer's attractive compositions and rich monochrome palette, engaging acting performances (more about those shortly) and a subtle understated score by Georges Delerue, I can't really gin up a flourish of unbridled enthusiasm for the film myself. There's nothing at all that I actively dislike about The Two of Us; it's a solid piece of work with a few distinctive touches that I'm glad to have experienced, but beyond that, it feels fairly commonplace, and if it had never been released by Criterion in the first place, I doubt many of us would have grumbled about its omission. The movie probably broke into more innovative territory when it was first released than is likely to be felt nowadays, when most viewers have by now sat through dozens (no exaggeration) of stories about pitiful children enduring varying degrees of hardship due to Nazi-inflicted abuses in World War II. Berri based much of the story on his own early life, which paralleled many of the incidents recounted in the film, and he does a credible job maintaining the tension of whether or not the boy's deception will be discovered, and if so, what kind of peril would ensue. Interspersed with that mild trail of suspense are numerous winsome sketches of life during wartime as seen through a perceptive child, which indirectly connects this film with one I spoke about recently on a podcast, Victor Erice's The Spirit of the Beehive.
I'd definitely put this film over and above most of the more recent variations on that theme, in that The Two of Us is content to take a more subtle, less cloying or manipulative approach in winning our affection for its characters. The story is about Claude, a young Jewish boy sent to live with a crusty old Catholic couple in rural France during the final turbulent months of the German occupation. He's given strict instruction by his parents to conceal his ethnicity, learning to spell his new last name and warned about the perils of revealing his circumcision, lest his ruse be detected. After the premise is established, the charm of the film rests upon watching the development of a warm, unlikely bond between "the old man and the boy," as the film's French title is more properly translated. The old man, a gruff bumpkin whose crude anti-Semitism is more a product of rustic ignorance than deep-seated malice, is played by the inimitable Michel Simon, in one of his last great roles.
Michel Simon, considered washed-up and practically forgotten at this point in his acting career, made memorable appearances in the early days of this blog, when as a much younger man he basically stole the show in films like Boudu Saved from Drowning and Port of Shadows. His brawny physique, rough hewn facial features, unruly hair and untamed wild-man persona served him well over the course of fifty years as an actor, and all those attributes are vigorously put to work here, to the degree that it sparked a late revival in his professional fortunes that carried him into the mid-1970s. I would say that anyone who's a fan of Simon's work in those golden age classics of French cinema owes it to themselves to catch him in this one. It's kind of a shame that the movie is not available on Hulu, since the disc's subdued physical media sales (a hefty $39.95 SRP may also bear partial blame) probably deprives a lot of viewers of the enjoyment they'd find in his performance. Beyond my sincere endorsement of Simon's contributions, and the overall winsomeness of the child actor Alain Cohen who portrayed Claude, much of my estimation of the success of movies of this sort depends on how they end. In my opinion, Berri steered The Two of Us to a satisfyingly ambiguous, non-declarative conclusion of the sort that most die-hard Criterion fans seem to prefer. Since most of you haven't seen the movie, I won't say more about the final scene than that... but this clip will spoil it for you if you watch past the three-minute mark. There, I warned you!
Next: David Holzman's Diary
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