Almost Peaceful

"Movies about survival often divide between those that grimly insist on the triumph of the human spirit and those equally grim testaments to absolute despair. In ALMOST PEACEFUL, a gently observed film about Holocaust survivors from the French director Michel Deville, survival means something other than choked laughter and sentimental bromides or brute, animal struggle. Survival also means the modest, faltering steps the not-dead take toward the resumption of everyday normal life. Based on an autobiographical novel by Robert Bober, a French writer and filmmaker who worked as an assistant director on a handful of early Francois Truffaut features, ALMOST PEACEFUL opens in the summer of 1946. In an upstairs apartment on an anonymous Parisian street, Albert (Simon Abkarian) and his sad-eyed wife, La (Zabou Breitman), are raising two young children and running a modest tailoring shop where most of the employees are other survivors. Amid the warm, enveloping hum of steady work and clattering machines, Jews who survived the death camps work side by side with Jews who evaded their horrors, fashioning a new world for themselves stitch by careful stitch." — Manohla Dargis, The New York Times