Original title (FR): La Cache (The Cache)
Based on the novel by Christophe Boltanski, Lionel Baier’s fast-paced, moving, and impeccably art-directed comedy transports us to Paris in May 1968, viewed through the eyes of a nine-year-old boy. While student-led protests rock the city and promise to change the world forever, the boy is having the time of his life. His parents are on the barricades, but the rest of his unusual, multigenerational family is gleefully crammed into their shared apartment: his charismatic, creative uncles; his grandfather, a Jewish professor of medicine; his grandmother, a wryly smiling French author; and great-grandmother, a former dancer from Odessa, wrapped in her bedclothes and her memories of pre-war glamor. But the tumult in the streets brings echoes of the past: the last time soldiers and police roamed the streets, the uncles had been forced to wear yellow stars on their jackets, and grandfather to hide in a secret spot beneath the stairs. It’s this hiding place that an exceedingly exalted and profoundly unexpected personage seeks out when he turns up at the family’s door. Baier has the gift of a light touch with serious material, and this film, with its nods to cultural touchstones of 1960s Paris, its jazz score, and its extremely stylish filmmaking, oozes charm while making a serious argument about history, memory, and movies.
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