After the dramatic comedy Passport, broadcast on Canal+ last month — an international production staging a Georgian Jew who emigrates to Israel against his will, remarkably played by Gérard Darmon — the expression of Jewish identity in cinematic creation reaches new milestones within mainstream French cinema with Alexandre Arcady’s new film, Le Grand Pardon II (Day of Atonement II).
A sequel to the Le Grand Pardon (Day of Atonement) saga, in which all the characters find one another again ten years later under a different sun, that of Florida, for new and larger-scale mafia adventures. The first film ended with the arrest of Raymond Bettoun (Roger Hanin) for the murder, on the Day of Atonement, of his associate-rival and traitor (Bernard Giraudeau). Having paid his debt to society, Raymond Bettoun is welcomed back into his family as a patriarch. During those ten years in prison in France, his whole “tribe” regrouped in Miami, where it grew vastly wealthy. His son (Richard Berry), for his part, prospered in real estate and in banking… specialized in money laundering. He is about to take a step the elder Bettoun had always forbidden himself: that of the drug trade. A thriller written American-style and, as in Le Parrain (The Godfather), in the efficiency of the violence of the image.
Yet beyond the plot and its implausibilities, this second act by Arcady plainly answers a purpose other than that of giving a “Part II” to a successful first film — a purpose whose watchword would be TESTIMONY. The Bettoun family and the sometimes excessive adventures of its members then become a broad canvas on which another story is written. A more “moral” one, since Raymond Bettoun, the former Parisian “godfather” of pimping and racketeering, will pay beyond his debt to society; he will expiate his sins. Like a figure of tragedy, Roger Hanin moves masterfully through the script to reap what he has sown. He will know the real sorrows of a father who has not “given enough” (as he himself puts it) or, one might say, who has handed down false values to his family. He thus seeks to “cleanse” himself and to cleanse the lost generation of its sins — including by avenging himself, he the Sephardi, upon the villainous “Pasco,” son of a Nazi who reinvented himself in South America and head of the international drug network. Here Arcady demonstrates a taking-on of the Jewish past.
In this other facet of the film, everything then becomes an occasion to bear witness: Arcady depicts with tenderness and emotion the colors and beliefs of a small, warmhearted group of “Jews of Algeria” attached to their traditions. Here, everything is an occasion to evoke: Algeria first of all, the Algeria of before Le Coup de Sirocco (The Stroke of Sirocco), the Algeria of festivities in the company of lute players and of singers reeling off the popular songs of Oran or Constantine; the sun, even if it is Florida’s, the presence of actors such as Roger Hanin, Gérard Darmon, Jean Benguigui, Amidou, effectively secures an authenticity that the author has clearly sought to fix on film, as he has loved to do for others of his films: Pour Sacha (For Sacha), or the short film made in the native town of Patrick Bruel. An evocation, too, of the rites of their Jewish tradition: from the very long Bar Mitzvah ceremony in Miami (Sephardic rite, if you please) to the family Shabbat dinner and the wake, it is all there. Beyond the fidelity of the testimony, did the author wish to free himself from the reproaches of the religious Jewish community regarding the public depiction of Jewish festivals mingled with infamy and banditry? These scenes illustrate at least that the sterile reproduction of rites stripped of their founding values cannot, despite their warmhearted aspect, take part in a transmission of any quality. Touching and pitiful indeed is this grandfather who can hand down to his dear grandson (already, for his part, inscribed in another future) nothing but rites stripped of the ethics of Judaism, and distant memories which, though they have the sweetness of “milk and honey,” no longer hold meaning except for those who lived them. There is no cause to reopen this polemic, nor that of whether or not a specifically Jewish cinema exists; but this point deserves to be raised, since in his film Arcady pleads for a living memory.
His film has the great merit of underscoring at least one thing: Jewish expression in mainstream French cinema has crossed important milestones. As in American cinema (that of Woody Allen, among others), it publicly affirms a Jewish identity without guilt, without the visceral fear of the gaze of others; in thus detaching itself, it shows itself ready simply to confront a social reality that has won its place in the sun of the media. One may then hope to see in it the maturity of a Jewish (and non-Jewish) public, served by the talent and the courage of artists of conviction.