70
It's a quiet film, shunning melodrama and political polemic. Instead, it opts for a human touch, conveying how a group of very different survivors come to terms with the past and plan a future in their own unique ways.
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What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
75
Christian Science Monitor by David Sterritt
The gently told comedy-drama is more colorful than you'd expect, using wry humor and lively music to keep sentimentality at bay.
80
A gentle, sad and at times funny film in the best French tradition of high-quality cinema.
75
New York Daily News by Jack Mathews
These are people who are just waking up to life again. It may appear to be the ultimate non-action movie, but in the context of these lives, it is the highest kind of drama.
80
French director Michel Deville has managed to preserve the work's great virtues--the intimacy, discretion, grace, and humor with which it speaks of both irredeemable disaster and the taste for life that survives it.
70
TV Guide Magazine by Maitland McDonagh
Deville gently reveals that they're all simultaneously hauntingly fragile and amazingly resilient, their smiles as piercing as any resigned gaze.
70
The New York Times by Manohla Dargis
It takes talent to make audiences care about ordinary people doing ordinary things, just as it takes guts to end a movie with something as corny as the sounds of children playing.
25
New York Post by Megan Lehmann
Presumably, Deville wants to show life returning to normal after WWII, but in the context of this inert movie, "normal" equals "tedious."
50
Too many of these characters behave like they just stepped out of a Noel Coward production.
70
New York Magazine (Vulture) by Peter Rainer
The film was adapted from a 1993 novel by Robert Bober, who drew on his own childhood experiences, and as it unwinds, one begins to appreciate Deville's desire to see things work out well for these people.