(Credit: Palace Films)

This intense, thoughtful film is based on the stage play by Jean-Phillippe Daguerre. First performed in 2016, the play won prestigious Molière awards following its run in France, as well as four National Theatre Awards. The playwright gave his friend, filmmaker Fred Cavayé, carte blanche to adapt the script to film as he saw fit. Cavayé has made it a brilliant character study that deals with the tempting safety of complicity with power and its unexpected consequences.

The setting is 1941, German-occupied Paris. Mr Haffmann (competently portrayed by Daniel Auteuil) is a jeweller who owns a shop and adjoining house, where he lives with his family in relative prosperity and peace. When the Nazis in France begin to close in, and notices appear in the streets requiring all Jews to register with the German occupying forces, the Jewish Haffmann family see the literal writing on the wall and decide to leave the country covertly. Mrs Haffmann and her daughter leave first, while Mr Haffmann stays behind to make arrangements for their property. These arrangements introduce the peculiar human drama, which is the main focus of the script.

In the hope of someday returning, Mr Haffmann makes his assistant, Mr Mercier (Gilles Lellouche), an offer. He sells the house and shop to Mercier for no cost. On paper, the property has been sold to Mercier for a reasonable sum before its former owner departed, providing a plausible record for the authorities. Mercier will live in the house and will run the shop, keeping any profits for himself, then return it all to Haffmann once France is hopefully liberated. Mercier has a solemn appreciation for the trust being placed in him but is also overjoyed at the windfall it represents for himself and his wife, Blanche (Sara Giraudeau). When Mr Haffmann’s escape is blocked, and he must return and remain hidden in his own home, everything begins to change.

The film offers a slow-burning suspense story in which the relationship between the two men, former employer and assistant, gradually changes as Mercier becomes the owner for all intents and purposes, Haffmann the refugee, entirely dependent on Mercier for his very survival. This tension comes, at first, from the shifting of roles. The former landlord and business owner is reduced to hiding in his own home, surviving on the goodwill of his former employee. Mutual civility begins to wear thin as Mercier becomes increasingly aware of the danger of his own position, concealing a Jewish resident under the noses of the German forces. Things grow increasingly complicated when German soldiers become frequent patrons of the jewellery shop, befriending Mercier and increasing his ambivalence about Haffmann’s presence in the house. Personal and professional jealousies add to the strain.

The story gradually introduces still more personal complications and more subtle but significant gamesmanship, some of it deliberate, some unconscious. Mrs Mercier, trying to make peace, leads the conflict in new directions. All this occurs with the constantly looming threat of the German authorities overshadowing and influencing everything, increasing the claustrophobic atmosphere and incipient paranoia until the suspense becomes acute, artfully managed by the taut script and careful direction.

Just as the anxiety among the three residents seems to have reached its peak, the situation takes a completely unexpected turn, which leads the story in an entirely new and illuminating direction. The story eventually unwinds into a strange, deeply ironic, and oddly satisfying conclusion. It’s not precisely a happy ending, but perhaps as happy as can be expected under the circumstances and more than appropriate to a story set in Nazi-occupied France.

The script by Daguerre is riveting for its portrayal of survival under an ever-present danger, its startling and ironic plot twists, its insights into the insidious effects of intolerance on even the best-intentioned, and most of all for its dark yet optimistic and painfully authentic, examination of human nature. Cavayé’s adaptation and direction, and a well-chosen trio of actors in the central roles, do justice to the original material.