How Bellisha, Lucien and Andrea Got out of Childhood

In the official selection of the 31th European Film Festival Palic (Serbia), several movies described the process by which some characters get out of childhood. It’s particularly the case for three of them : A Good Jewish Boy (Le dernier des juifs), The Magnet Man (De Magneet Man) and Andrea’s Love (El Amor de Andrea).

In A Good Jewish Boy, the main character is called Bellisha. His parents are apparently separated for years. He is 27. He has no job and he is still living with her mother, Giselle, who suffers from an incurable kidney disease. They live on a problem housing estate in the north of Paris where they seem to be some of the last Jewish people, surrounded by a population which is mainly Muslim. Bellisha is a very nice boy, attentive to his mother, but he can’t stop lying to her because he thinks that will reassure her. For example, he tells her he has a good job and that there are still many Jews in the neighbourhood.

This movie is full of humour, but there is also a very emotional scene in which Bellisha tells his mother he is aware that she is going to die and that she doesn’t have to worry about his future, even if she still considers him as a child.

A Good Jewish Boy is the first full-length feature movie from french filmmaker Noé Debré. This very good comedy deals with a true and interesting subject. It delivers a message of tolerance, with self-deprecation, showing how different religious communities can live well together. When his mother finally dies, Bellisha chooses to leave the family apartment and refuses the life his father wants for him. We understand that with this choice, he decides to become an adult. 

The Magnet Man also tells the story of a young man who becomes an adult at the end of the movie. At the beginning of the 20th century, Lucien lives with his mother in a rural village of Belgium. He has a strange physical particularity: he is a magnet man. Iron objects adhere to him. That puts him sometimes in very unusual situations, like being stuck to a train. 

With this very original subject, the Belgian filmmaker Gust van den Berghe tells a very interesting, poetic and sometimes funny story about this taciturn man who finds a job in a circus thanks to his magnetic power. The movie is sometimes a bit boring, but the characters are endearing, especially Lucien and Gervaise, the beautiful young woman with whom he falls in love. Like Bellisha in A Good Jewish Boy, this man who looks like a child refuses at the end of the movie the fate that his close relations want for him. He chooses his own destiny.

In Andrea’s Love, Spanish filmmaker Manuel Martin Cuenca also tells the story of a character that grows out of childhood by the end of the movie. Andrea is 15. She lives in Cadiz, in the south of Spain. She has two little brothers who she looks after a lot. They live with their mother, who works until late in the evening. Andrea’s parents are divorced and she doesn’t understand why her father doesn’t want to see her and her brothers any more. She doesn’t accept this situation. She is ready to do anything to change it, with the help of a lawyer and a friend who appears to be in love with Andrea.

This Spanish movie is touching. Cuenca depicts, in a very realistic style, the fight that Andrea is leading against the will of her parents to re-establish links with her father. She seems to have the most mature behaviour in her family.

Pierre-Yves Roger 
Edited by Amber Wilkinson
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