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Based on novelist Romain Gary's biography,this is the second version of the writer's youth .In her husband Jules Dassin's 1970 movie, Melina Mercouri hammed it up,but did convince as this character of a Jewish mom ,and it was the main asset of this earlier work.That director ,in his last part of his career,was succumbing to the vices of European cinema of the era: the slow motion sequences ,which were very trendy then are almost unbearable today.Romain was played by no less than three different actors.

The same goes for the remake :a boy ,a teenager and a young man (Niney,thus,only appears in the second half);.Charlotte Gainsbourg reprises La Mère-Couri 's role and compares favorably with her performance ,less histrionic,but always omnipresent -her arrival at the base is worth the price of admission-,ambitious ,demanding ,almost in love with her son (one never sees her have an affair with a single man ,though some of them (the painter, portrayed by the always reliable Darroussin)woo her .

Longer than the first version (101 min) ,this one (125 min) sometimes drags on and seems a little patchy and desultory but it's inherent in any biography ;sex scenes are more explicit (the initiation scene with the unexpected mom because of the coach incident is featured in both movies) .

War scenes are much more developed than in the first adaptation ;it sometimes verges on ridicule : the aviator ,suffering from typhoid,crosses the hospital stark naked .

Two small details : two soldiers were actually denied their promotion,Romain was not the only one ,but it 's less storylike on the paper,let alone on the screen. The 250 letters mom supposedly wrote are pure fiction; when he was in Africa, a telegram was sent to Romain who knew his dear one was dead when he came back to France.

The prologue in Mexico ,a bit gaudy , is a bit derivative:how many biographies were filmed as flashbacks?

All in all, you should see this remake ,but mainly for miss Gainsbourg ,in one of her best parts.

NB: When the first version was released,Gary was still alive ;hence the necessity to treat his material more gingerly.

A skilfully made bio-pic with really inpregnating and 'wise' words on the male psychy Production is round and very professional.

The film is almost entirely told as a flash-back, in which the life of the tormented writer is told in his own words. It is the equally gruesome, as beautifully told "confession" of a crushing motherly love and the destruction of the child's psyche under that pressure. All storylines are more than interesting, the two actors shine, but there is a postponed climax on script level. When it's there - horrific in it's consequences - we are one hour and a half in the movie. And that is too long to keep the attention fully focused.

The horrific consequences of the destructive mother lie at a deeper level of development of the writer and, in my opinion, should have been expressed less poetically and more realistically. But that is a style choice. It's a French movie after all, right?

Nonetheless, with great pleasure and deliberation, I have looked at the ode to a ruined life, where the talent of being a writer turns out to be both a victory and a curse.

La promesse de l'aube (2017) is a French film shown in the U.S. with the translated title Promise at Dawn. The movie was co-written and directed by Eric Barbier, based on a novel by Romain Gary. This is an autobiographical film, in which Gary is portrayed by Pierre Niney.

Gary was born in Poland, but became a renowned author in France. Some of what's in the movie is factual. The facts are exciting--Gary moved to France, and when the Germans conquered France, he joined the RAF.

One of the most exciting scenes in the movie shows Gary, as the navigator of a RAF bomber, talking the pilot--who is temporarily blinded--to the bombing target, and then back to the RAF airfield. (This actually happened.)

However, the movie isn't about Romain Gary's daredevil life. It's about Romain Gary and his mother, Nina Kacew, played by Charlotte Gainsbourg. If we are to believe the author, his mother played an immense role in his life--teaching him what he had to know, urging him on, and coming to him in dreams and hallucinations when she wasn't actually with him.

Who could have told us--other than Gary--how much of this was true? True of not, it certainly makes for an interesting script. The script only works because Gainsbourg is such a great actor. She's not always someone we like, but she's someone in whom we believe. I don't know another actor who could have pulled this off as well.

Incidentally, there's a confusing episode when the film starts. It's Day of the Dead in a small city in Mexico, and someone--we later learn that it's Gary--decides that he's dying and needs to go to a distant hospital in Mexico City.

Notice that the talented Catherine McCormack plays his wife, Lesley Blanch. Gary was a diplomat, and he and his wife were stationed in Mexico for a time, so maybe this really happened. (Gary later divorced Blanch and married Jean Seberg, darling of the French Nouvelle vague.)

I enjoyed this movie and would recommend it for people who like epics about famous, successful people. Promise at Dawn has a moderately strong IMDb rating of 7.2. I thought it was better than that, and rated it 8.

The demands in the name of love seem too harsh, even absurd. Maternal love is great, and so it is. But I don't think the maternal love in this film deserves to be publicized. The greatness here is entirely due to Roman's success. If Roman did not succeed, is there a circle in his maternal love. Roman's success depends on faith and luck. Mother's love is great, and it's hard to have a second Roman.

Watched it on a recent flight to Paris and glad that I did since I probably wouldn't have paid to see it (not the biggest Gainsbourg fan) and would've missed out on a modern classic. The two main characters in the film, the mother (Gainsbourg) and the son (Niney) carry the film due to the inspired performances of the actors playing those roles. Gainsbourg, in particular, gave a finely-tuned, nuanced performance that perfectly captured the extraordinarily devoted yet overbearing character of Nina; I'm now a big fan! Also inspired were the cinematography and the breathtaking dogfight scenes, which were probably the best I've seen in any war film. The first half of the film does meander a bit and the pace of it gets a bit patchy (hence the 9 stars instead of 10) but the second half more than makes up for it. I didn't know the film was based on a true story (i.e. Romain Gary's biography) until I read the closing credits, which made it that much more impactful and emphatic since real people actually lived the epic events portrayed in the film. The closing credits also had another shock but I won't reveal it here so that I won't spoil the film! All in all, this was probably the best film I've seen in a long while; it felt genuine, engrossing and it left me with tears in my eyes, though the airplane food may have contributed to that.

I was drawn to _Promise at Dawn_ by Charlotte Gainsbourg, who unfortunately gives one of her least enticing performances ever as the overbearing, almost insufferable mother figure. I once said that Gainsbourg would never grow old. But director Eric Barbier succeeds in the impossible -- depriving her character of any lightness or charm and aging her, not so much physically but mentally, beyond recognition.

I know next to nothing about French author Romain Gary prior to watching this film.

Unfortunately the film is not meant for people like me; it is like an Anglo-American biopic about literary figures, featuring almost none of the written words that make the subject interesting in the first place.

The film does end very well (glad I stuck with it till the end), with a legendary WWII episode. And the framing device -- an aging Romain Gary being taken care of by his steely wife (Lesley Blanch) -- yields some of the best scenes. Catherine McCormack sure makes the most of her limited screen time; the teaction shots of her finishing reading Gary's biography are priceless. McCormack is such a sensational actress, but is sadly relegated to cameo roles these days. By the way, her character Blanch is also a writer of note, but you wouldn't know if from the film. Perhaps someone can make a film about the first wife, starring McCormack?

I confess that I had great expectations and some emotions before seeing 'La promesse de l'aube'. Romain Gary was together with Boris Vian, the favorite French writer of my adolescence, and 'La promesse de l'aube' was one of my beloved books paired with Vian's 'L'ecume des jours'. The new version of the film (its second adaptation to screen) directed by Eric Barbier fully met my expectations.

The book and the film tell about two love stories. The first of these is the love of a mother for her son, an unlimited love, a love that is remembered by the writer over the years, a love that determined the course of his life. In most of the world's literature and languages for such a mother the common expression is 'Jewish mother', only in Hebrew such a mother is called a 'Polish mother'! Both fit here. The son's answer is, of course, the book that Romain Gary wrote decades later, the book that inspired the film. I can say without hesitation that this book is unique in the literature in its description of the relationship between a mother and her son. The second love story is for France. The book's heroine passionately loves her country of adoption, the country that saved her life, sheltered her, gave her the dignity. Nina Kacew educates her son to love France, returning the love that seems to have been offered to them unconditionally. However, none of the two love stories are happy to the end. Romain Gary's life will be cut short by suicide, and it is impossible to establish which were the sources of despair and disappointment that led to this, but it can not be ruled out that the partial failure of the life plan predestined by his mother had a role. The love of the Jews sheltered by France for their country and their readiness to return their gratitude with all sacrifices, including life, was hardly put to the test of history, from the Dreyfuss case to the racial persecutions and deportations during the Second World War. The book and the film end up in an optimistic note, but readers and viewers know this is not the whole story.

'La promesse de l'aube' is a captivating and exciting movie. Many viewers, probably, like me, know the intrigue and the characters, yet the precision of the details, together with the sensitivity and the passion of the actors, create a moving story that cannot leave the spectators indifferent. Charlotte Gainsbourg is fascinating as a woman living through several ages, struggling to survive and succeed, radiating the fierce love for her son, conveying her passion for life and her love for the adoptive country. All the three actors who represent the writer at different ages are excellently chosen and play very well, with a special mention for Pierre Niney who creates again a superb role and consolidates in my eyes his position as one of the best French actors of the moment. Watching the film not only did not disappoint me at any point in comparison with the emotions related to reading 'La promesse de l'aube' many decades ago, but added new dimensions to the intellectual experience around this exceptional book.

Absolutely DIVINAL! Majestic interpretations and how history grabs you to the screen is remarkable

What a extraordinary history, what a fascinating film. What a fascinating couple: mother and son. What a difficult question: is it possible to love too much?can morhers love be toxic? The mother and her son. The mother who invented herself invented Whole world invented her son. Who repeated him: you will be famous be a writer be a diplomat, you will buy your suits in London. And he did. He did it for mother, he become a famous novelist and a diplomat and War hero. For mother not for himself. He wrote that duch a love can be too much. And commited suicide. Answer that question about love

Apparently, the screenwriters thought Nina Kacew a hysterical "castrating mother", as per the tritest misogynistic stereotype, and Romain Gary a farcical momma's boy, without a shred of the inimitable intelligence and humour that is to be found everywhere in his body of work.

But, believe it or not, the worst of it all is "not" this contemptuous treatment, it is the direction by Eric Barbier, so thoroughly pedestrian that it would have turned even the most adventurous of tales into a complete and utter bore - quite an undertaking, for a movie marketed as "epic".

Throw in some shallow and/or hammy acting by both Gainsbourg and Niney, and there you have it - a legit turkey of a film.

To the tentative audience: go find "Promise at dawn" by Jules Dassin instead (by no means a masterpiece, but decent at least), or do yourself a favour and read Romain Gary - for all his flaws, he is worth your time, contrary to this movie.

P. S.: This is my first review, after fourteen years of membership, and written in my fourth language: so now the reader can fully realize the scope of my indignation!

A great story, well told and represented. A good movie starts in a great script. French cinema continues to bring us the finest art.

First of all, I love french cinema, and I've never seen a french movie that is bad or that has low making quality. And 'La promesse de l'aube' isn't the exception. It is completely engaging, wonderful and just... perfect!

The story and how the script tells it is excellent and real. It takes us along for many years, ages and times that the main character has passed through, and it never gets boring in any minute. It makes you care about him as if he was your friend, your brother or someone you appreciate a lot. And the photography that portrayed Romain Gary's words and the score that accompain it is great and magnificent.

The performances were devastatingly masterful. Pierre Niney is one of my favourites and of the most talented actors I've seen in my entire life and his job in this film confirms it even more. Charlotte Gainsbourg was also great and at times frightening at her role.

10/10 A total masterpiece that has to be seen by every cinephile. Thank you for reading!

Very good dramatic comedy about the impressive life of Jewish writer and military pilot Romain Gary (Kacew), his relashionship with his crazy, controlling and abusive mother (he loved her, but I did not see a so bad mother since Brian de Palma's "Carrie") and anti-Semitism during and before World War II. Quite dark humor for narrating a glorious but tragic life.

The most mother and brave child. Heart breaking history full with self superation adventures.

An amazing human story, great performance by Gainsbourg and even better by a French rising star in movies !

I watched every minute of this film with such excitement. truly an amazing film. there is nothing wrong with this picture. i am so glad i made the right choice of watching it. strongly recommended.

WOW!! French writer Romain Gary has more in common with me that just his pen name, like me he was a Mama's Boy. Sort of a French Hemingway with mostly mommy issues as well as military service in WW2. There was also the command from his Mother: "Go Kill Hitler!" This amazing movie starts during RG's boyhood and continues thru every phase of his amazing life. No shortage of drama, to say the least. RIght now this is playing at the Quad cinema on 13th st in Manhattan (9/6/19). I was able to see the Mom in the movie in person, the great French actor Charlotte Gainsbourg showed up for a post-screening Q&A. What a bonus !! That was a one-time deal but if U know any momma's boys treat them to this movie, they'll love this Momma too!

I enjoyed very much this film based on the novel "La Promesse de l'Aube " of Romain Gary. A beautiful story about the complicated and touching relationship of Romain and his mother Nina who wants that her son becomes the ambassador of France and a great writer.

So we follow Romain and Nina in Vilnius and later Varsaw, the childhood of Romain-the first love with Valentina-, the business of his mother and the antisemitism. The travel to Nice, the beginning of the writing,and then the Second World Wae- the troubles of Romain because of his Jew origin., Romain joining the French Liberation army, the stay in Africa and later his engagement in the French Liberation army.

I enjoyed very much the perfomances of Pierre Niney,Charlotte Gaisbourg, Didier Bourdon, Jean-Pierre Droussin and Catherine Mc Cormack.

Eric Barbier's Promise at Dawn (La promesse de l'aube) adapts Romain Gary's autobiographical novel, chronicling his extraordinary life and the profound influence of his fiercely devoted mother. Despite its compelling source material and strong performances, the film struggles to balance its emotional depth with its sprawling narrative.

Pierre Niney portrays Romain Gary with intensity and vulnerability, capturing his journey from a troubled childhood to his experiences in World War II. Charlotte Gainsbourg delivers a commanding performance as Nina, Gary's ambitious and self-sacrificing mother, whose larger-than-life personality dominates the film. Their dynamic provides the emotional core, but it often feels overly melodramatic, undercutting the nuance of their relationship.

Visually, the film is lush, with picturesque settings that bring the various stages of Gary's life to life. However, the pacing feels uneven, with some parts dragging while others rush through significant moments. This lack of balance makes it difficult to fully connect with the characters' arcs.

The screenplay, co-written by Barbier and Marie Eynard, attempts to capture the epic scope of Gary's life but falters in maintaining focus. The film often leans too heavily on sentimentality, losing the sharp wit and introspection of the novel.

Promise at Dawn is a film for those who appreciate grand, emotionally charged stories, but it may leave viewers yearning for a more cohesive and restrained adaptation.

Rating: 5/10 - A visually beautiful but uneven portrayal of a remarkable life.