Marcel Marceau wasn’t his real name but it’s the one he chose, well before he became the world’s most famous mime artist, to hide the fact that he was Jewish. Being a Jew in France in 1940 wasn’t healthy, as we know.
That much, this movie gets right. From there it’s factually challenged. If you knew nothing about Marceau (real name Mangel), you’d learn a lot from the film and most of it would be pure fabrication. Marceau’s family took the unusual step of publicly disowning the film in a statement to Variety, in December 2018.
Why would someone trash the real story of what Marceau did as a member of the Jewish Resistance during the war? Saving 70 Jewish children from the Nazis wasn’t adventure enough? Apparently not. Director Jonathan Jakubowicz puts Marceau, played by Jesse Eisenberg, up against Klaus Barbie, the notorious ‘Butcher of Lyon’, in a series of encounters that never happened (Marceau was in Limoges and Barbie – played here with fastidious malevolence by Matthias Schweighofer – was about 400km away).
Jakubowicz also invents a love interest for Marcel, a girl from his hometown of Strasbourg. Emma (played by delightfully named Clemence Poesy) and her sister Mila (Vica Kerekes) are part of a group of Jewish activists who take care of 123 Jewish children – all orphans – whose lives have been saved by bribing the Nazis. One of those saved is a teenager called Elsbeth (Bella Ramsey) who has seen both parents murdered in the street in Berlin. She becomes like a sister to the young Marcel, who’s reluctantly drawn into caring for the children by his cousin Georges (Geza Rohrig, from Son of Saul).
Read the article by Paul Byrnes in The Sydney Morning Herald.