विदाई, मिस्टर हाफमैन

Flawless work by the cast make this watch an emotion inducing one. It's a people story full of artistic expressions. Great visuals to portray how lives changed. A chronicle on what people saw, felt and had to live through in a time of death. Farewell Mr. Haffmann is for the keen minds to revisit history and admire the strange ways of human mind the fountain of persona.

As revisionism is running rampant in Europa , films such as "l'homme de la cave " (also feat Auteuil) and "Adieu Monsieur Haffmann" are deeply appropriate to our times,appropriate in a way that recent works like "une jeune fille qui va bien " are not.

The depiction of occupied Paris in those darker hours of the twentieth century is uncompromising : the milice and the collaborators, the gendarmes -the story takes place in 1941,the year before the the roundup of Jews in the Paris Velodrome d'hiver-, checking the identity papers , the piles of informers' letters in the offices , the jewels stolen from the deported -where do they come from ? Asks the jeweller hidden in his cellar :the moment when he discovers among them his old friend's pendant is harrowing- , women sleeping with the enemy to get them ,the growing terror of the Jews : although he does not know the existence of the concentration camps ,the jeweller asks himself :"they are going to work in Germany? These old men???"

Some people will blame the director for showing the warts and all of the occupied France: the characters are either afraid (the butcher/smuggler) or profiteers , a la "Lacombe Lucien ": what's the matter,if he's not part of the milice ? Like Louis Malle's hero,he "protects "a Jew ,but,slowly and inexorably, he realizes he can own the workshop and drink champagne in the parties with the German ; like Joseph Losey's "Monsieur Klein" who would buy the Jews' valuable paintings for a song ,the employee understands his time may have come: this is a huis clos , most of the action taking place in a workshop or in a cellar where the owner becomes ,little by little, a prisoner ."I'll pay you what you used to give me "(when you were the boss); no humiliation is spared the jeweller : as his former employee is sterile, he wants him to get his wife pregnant .

Playing with fire may be dangerous : note the similarities -on a smaller scale- with the ending of "Monsieur Klein"!

Extremely well acted by Gilles Lellouche as the unscrupulous employee,Sara Giraudeau as the bewildered wife ,and Daniel Auteuil who perhaps needed this role to make up for the hateful hero of "l'homme de la cave" :he's another "man in the cellar" after all.

Movies on Holocaust are always very emotional but this one is even more loaded with all kinds of emotions. The characters just jump out of the screen and become a part of your life too. It takes a very good script, an excellent direction and larger-than-life actors to achieve that.

Set in 1941 the film is mostly set in the jewelry shop of Mr Haffman. As such it could almost be a stage play. It is atmospherically filmed (with plenty of suspense) and the audience becomes closely involved with the characters.

The character development is clever with the audience's sympathy moving away away from the protagonist as the story develops. I really enjoyed the plot twists with several really clever reveals that added excellent depth to the story.

Sara Giraudeau is fabulous as Blanche.

To set the scenes appropriately, extract the best from your actors and reduce the background music - make the audience they're a part of the movie too - simply brilliant!