À demain (1992) - film review

Pierre looks back on his childhood with affection.  His sanctuary is his bedroom in a large house in Paris, where he lives with his sister, parents, his grandparents, and his great-grandmother.  His father and grandfather each run a medical practice from the house, whilst his grandmother, Tété, provides acupuncture treatment.  Apart from a few domestic crises, Pierre’s childhood is a happy one, filled with precious moments and treasured memories, particularly of his dying grandmother.

À demain is one of those sweetly nostalgic auto-biographical films which you know you ought to hate and yet somehow you can’t.  In spite of its twee narrative style and simplistic direction, the film is strangely charming, offering an endearing portrait of a happy middleclass family in the early 1960s.  Some moments of dramatic comedy punctuate the lives of a nauseatingly functional family, but there are some sequences with real emotion.  Most memorable are the understated yet very moving heart-to-heart scenes with the young Pierre and his grandmother (played with beautiful sincerity by Jeanne Moreau).  The latter’s attempts to prepare the young boy for her impending death are intensely poignant, all the more so for the direct, unsentimental manner in which they are played.

© James Travers 2006

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