If you want to see a film about how an ordinary French family used to live in the 1940s, "Le Café du Pont" is a film for you. Rarely indeed has a movie been more accurate in this field than Manuel Poirier's last opus. The director has indeed taken great care to recreate the period described (1944-1946) with attention to the slightest details: clothes, interior decoration, cars , dinner things, tools, ...everything looks true. And not only the objects but the period behaviors are wonderfully captured : the regulars of the café, the priest, the farmers, the grandmother (who urinates in nature and expresses the pleasure of relief in local dialect!) are not played by stars or even well-known supporting actors but by unknown (albeit excellent) performers who do not play but ARE ordinary French people of that time : people who were hardworking but heavy drinkers, who could be witty but occasionally violent, people who were big mouths and/or affectionate friends, parents or kids.
Of course, if you are a fan of testosterone/explosion/car chase-filled movies, this one is not for you. Manuel Poirier takes his time and the pace is leisurely. This is a chronicle, not an epic saga. But even everyday life has its tensions (the nervous German soldiers; the sadistic school master, the mother's illness). Nevertheless, it is the pleasure to be alive that the director, a bit like Auguste Renoir and his son Jean did , celebrates: angling, picnicking, dipping one's bread into Mummy's delicious cassoulet, picking mushrooms with Granny, being in harmony with others, are small things happiness is made of. With a pointillist's art Manuel Poirier, involves the viewer step by step, vignette after vignette, making us fonder and fonder of the enterprising father, the stalwart mother and the two boys, Pierrot and Jeannot.
And what adds value to this fine film is that, finally, it does not really tell the story of just another little boy. Little Pierrot is actually Pierre Perret, the future singing star of the 1960s and the 1970s, the one that made us laugh with his hilarious comic songs ("Le tord boyaux", "Les jolies colonies de vacances","Les postières"), brought us to tears with such tenderly poetic songs as "Blanche" or "Mon P'tit Loup", awakened our consciousness to issues like rape ("Mon p'tit loup"), racism ("Lily") or the North-South relationship ("Riz pilé"). No explicit indication about what Pierrot will become is given in the film. For the time being, he is a kid like many others, but what is amusing for the viewer who is in the know is to find elements in Perrot's youth which contain the seeds of the the Pierre Perret to be: joking customers of his parent's café who will inspire his own flashes of wit, the instrument he learns to play and the musician he becomes at his father's ballroom, the transmission of tenderness by loving parents, etc.
A breath of fresh air in the heat of a hot Summer, "Le Café du Pont" is a must-see, all the more because Bernard Campan brings welcome restraint and dignity to the role of the father. Little-known Cécile Rebboah is on par as the energetic mother. The rest of the cast is excellent too. Among a majority of unknown actors, two Manuel Poirier regulars, Sacha Bourdo as a Polish fugitive, and Sergi Lopez as a mole catcher, make a guest appearance.
