Monsieur Batignole is set in Paris in 1942. This is a tricky time to bring to life without upsetting many people, most of them French -- unless, of course, humour is involved.

Indeed, Monsieur Batignole is a comedy of sorts, but as you'd expect, only on the outside. This is a story about a weak man leading an unexamined life and what it takes to change all that to something good.

M. Batignole (Gerard Jugnot) is a butcher in Paris. The story begins when he accuses his neighbour's child of stealing a couple of hams, inadvertently preventing the neighbours, who are Jewish, from escaping the city and the Germans. The family is rounded up. Tsk, tsk, thinks the butcher, but as he says, "I don't want any trouble."

Anyway, with the neighbours gone, he and his family can move into their lovely apartment, and he can continue to cater for German officers. And the move isn't M. Batignole's idea, anyway. It's all the doing of his ambitious wife (Michele Garcia, in a brilliant performance bound to incur the wrath of all Paris.) M. Batignole, you understand, just goes with the flow.

Then, one of the children of that Jewish family shows up on his doorstep. Against his better judgment, he hides the little boy (Jules Sitruk). Batignole tries very hard to get rid of the child -- and for his efforts, one child becomes three. The more people he contacts to help get the children out of France and into Switzerland, the more Batignole becomes determined to get them over the border himself.

So he decides to risk everything to try to do just that.

Monsieur Batignole is the story of an ordinary man who is, almost in spite of himself, transformed into a hero. Jugnot plays Batignole as an everyman type -- never exactly hateful, never exactly admirable -- a man who is busy keeping his head down until forced to do otherwise.

(Almost all the characters here are ambiguous to some degree, although the viewer is invited to do any straight-up hissing and booing at the character of Batignole's son-in-law, who is just plain bad and an odd diversion in the story.)

Jugnot manages, quietly, to place chilling historical detail in the midst of his story. Here, for example, is M. Batignole in a warehouse full of household valuables, the belongings of the Jewish families who have been arrested and sent off to the camps. Paintings. Furniture. Pianos. Everything is neatly stored and catalogued. It's devastating.

Monsieur Batignole is too long and in some ways too chipper for its own subject matter, but the focus on one man makes the larger issues easier to grasp. And that would seem to be the point.

(This film is rated PG)

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