Most films try to replicate real life. Few succeed in mirroring it. Claude Berri's The Two of Us is an extraordinary example of the latter. It presents a full cast of characters who we actually grow to believe are real people, not just actors playing a part. The two central characters are Claude Longuet, a young Jewish boy sent to the countryside by his parents to escape the Holocaust and Pepe, an old grandfather who takes him in. Together, they form a close friendship. There's only one problem. Pepe is a rampant anti-Semite who has no idea that Claude is a Jew. Here is where the film transcends merely replicating real life and starts to echo it. Pepe is not vilified for his antisemitism. By all accounts he is a loving, doting old man. There are only a handful of scenes where he mentions his views on Jews, and even then it doesn't seem to reflect an inward hatred, but instead casual beliefs ingrained upon him by an ignorant culture. Most, if not all, films that feature racist characters are so concerned with proving them wrong that they become one dimensional caricatures. But here, the film views Pepe in much the way that a small child like Claude would: as an amalgam of many different persona and emotions. Is he wrong? Most certainly. Is he a bad person? No...just a misguided one. The film is a marvelous examination of life through the eyes of a child. Yes, there is a war going on. But it is almost always mentioned in passing. Claude, and the film, is much more interested in the pretty little girl down the lane, the act of chasing a goose down the side of a hill, and playing soldiers with his classmates. When Claude's head is shaved for being a naughty boy by his schoolteacher, it is treated as a much more devastating tragedy than all of the examples of German oppression in France. The Two of Us is a simple, honest film about growing up during wartime. It remembers that the bombers only came at night and that the children still played in the grass the following morning.
9/10
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