Almost Peaceful

Almost Peaceful

Every day, eight or nine people meet in a sunny upstairs room in Paris to sew clothes. The room belongs to Albert and Lea, who own the business and have only recently employed these people, because it is 1946 and all but one of them are Jewish, and they have come back to their trade after the war. The atmosphere in the room is warm and talkative, relaxed almost to the point of carelessness; they seem to have been holding their breath for years and now they are grateful for a day that passes without incident.

“Almost Peaceful,” by Michel Deville, is not like other films about the Holocaust I’ve seen. In fact there isn’t yet an abstract concept of “the” Holocaust as these people reassemble their lives. They talk about what happened “the camps,” where so-and-so disappeared about the war itself, but not much because they were there themselves and don’t need to be reminded; not any of them except for one of them who’s gentile (and doesn’t know what that means) and thinks she’s just being funny when she asks a new employee his name at lunch one day with Lea: “Joseph Kohen.” She has no idea why they laugh until Lea takes her aside later on.

Albert (Simon Abkarian) runs the shop with Lea (Zabou Breitman). Their children are away at summer camp in the south, sending letters home. In addition there is an unemployed actor whose wife is pregnant; Maurice (Stanislas Merhar), a young man who visits prostitutes at a hotel down the street; another man who came back hoping that some relative would turn up alive somewhere on this block again; a new employee good for cutting fabric, maybe trimming here or there.

One day the gentile woman goes out to lunch with Albert; she wants him to find work for her sister, who had a child by a German soldier and after the war had her head shaved and was made to run naked through the town. She tells it as a sad story. But Albert can’t do anything for her; many people were unhappy in the war, he says, quietly.

Joseph (Malik Zidi) goes down to the police station to get himself straightened out with his papers; he recognizes the cop behind the desk. It is this man whom Joseph saw through the crack in a wardrobe where his parents had hidden him before this same cop took them away somewhere they couldn’t go. The cop is rude.

Joseph walks out onto the sidewalk, then turns back around and goes back inside and tells him that he knows who he is and what he did, and wants him to know that Joseph Kohen is here now, will stay here now, has every right to be here now. Then Joseph walks back outside again and goes down to a cafe and sits at a table there and bends over it with relief and some certain sadness.

There are few plots concerning the people, their kids, their friends, and their love affairs (Maurice always goes back to Simone who likes him well enough and prostitution not so much). Customers come and go. Albert has to approve every garment that leaves the store. He and Lea are happy beyond happiness. A woman comes around twice a week with things to sell.

Today she’s selling scented soaps. She’s also a matchmaker, and in her valise are letters and photographs of single people looking for a spouse. “Your marriageable people smell of soap,” one of the tailors kids her. “Was it better,” she asks, “when soap smelled of marriageable people?” This is not commented upon, but in a line like that an abyss of evil is glimpsed. They live softly here; they embrace routine; they love their jobs; they’re walking on ice; they know how fragile life can be; they know how security can deceive.

The film ends with a picnic, and the sound of children playing. There is a new generation. There is the feeling that marriageable people should be married, and having children. Maurice and Simone seem to be arriving at that conclusion. Life goes on that is what this movie is about except for the unspeakable horrors it isn’t about.

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