France, 1938. Jewish-born Marcel Mangel (Jesse Eisenberg) works in a Butchery owned and operated by his father Charles (Karl Markovics). Marcel disregards his father’s attempts to push him into the family business and spends his time performing Charlie Chaplin routines in a local cabaret bar and painting backdrops in his room for a one man show he plans on staging.
At the same time, Marcel’s cousin Georges (Géza Röhrig), along with a small cadre of resistance supporters, smuggle Jewish orphans from the concentration camps and supply them with false documents so they can hide in plain sight at Catholic orphanages and schools.
Soon, Marcel gets involved in not only the orphan smuggling but also with the struggle against the Nazi occupation itself, when he decides to commit to helping his resistance fighter brother Alain (Felix Moati).
Marcel’s life in Vichy France becomes about survival. He has a burgeoning romance with a fellow Resistance fighter named Emma (Clémence Poesy) and she, along with all the other resistance fighters understand the sacrifice required, something that is writ large in one harrowing sequence where Emma and her sister Mila (Vica Kerekes) undergo some seriously disturbing mental and physical torture at the hands of the infamous ‘Butcher of Lyon’ SS Officer Klaus Barbie, a monstrous sadist who himself was the subject of the 1988 documentary Hôtel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie, ‘Terminus’ being the Hotel commandeered by the Gestapo and the SS when they occupied the city of Lyon.
Most audience members will not have heard of Marcel Mangel, but they would have heard of Marcel Marceau, the stage name he would later assume. Marceau himself rarely spoke of this part of his life, the details used in the scripting of this film were themselves cobbled together from different sources, including the firsthand account of Marceau’s cousin, Georges Loinger.
There are some well-observed moments of transcendence as Marcel performs mime for an audience of terrified orphans. These sequences threaten to tumble into the god-awful treacle of Life is Beautiful and call to mind Roberto Benigni’s incessant clowning in that film, similarly deployed to distract children from the horrors surrounding them. This can be calamitous territory for a filmmaker (as Jerry Lewis discovered for his unfinished 1972 disaster The Day the Clown Cried) but Writer/Director Jonathan Jakubowicz shows restraint here and handles difficult scenes with deft direction.
Eisenberg still carries typecasting baggage from his numerous twitchy teen/fast-talking hipster roles, so it takes a moment to believe him as a young Marcel Marceau, though the performance he delivers is quietly intense, depicting Marcel as someone who is ungainly under stress, but at ease in his own skin, whenever performing his mime.
The emotional impact of the film, despite the true-life story it is based on, feels strangely slight and though it does pull its punches at times, it still makes for rewarding viewing. It’s a well-crafted tale and one which deserves to be told, revealing the secret traumas of an artist’s formative past.