Little Nicholas (2009)

Little Nicholas arrives from 2009 France with no agenda beyond the modest business of making an audience smile, and it pursues that goal with a single-mindedness that borders on the monastic. Laurent Tirard adapts René Goscinny and Jean-Jacques Sempé's children's books into a warm, sunlit stroll through the Paris suburbs of the 1960s, where a boy named Nicolas misreads his parents' dinner-party plans as the announcement of a sibling and mobilizes his schoolyard cohort in a campaign of increasingly absurd self-improvement. The plot is a misunderstanding, sustained with the patience of a bedtime story. Nothing here wants to teach anyone anything.

The ensemble is drawn from the deep bench of French comic acting, and the children are sturdy archetypes: the glutton, the rich one, the dunce, the fighter. Alceste's appetite is a running gag, not a statement. Geoffroy's butler exists to be tricked. Marie-Edwige attends a tea party and is never asked to carry a thesis about girlhood. When the father courts his impossible boss over dinner, the scene plays as farce about a nervous man and a difficult guest, and the class politics of the arrangement go unexamined, because examination is not what anyone involved came to do. The film regards its own era through a soft-focus lens and finds nothing in it to indict.

The picture earned a fortune in France and mostly kind notices abroad, which feels proportionate. It offers blue skies, good manners, and not a hair out of place, to borrow a phrase from an admiring critic, and it means every pleasant thing it says. There is no sermon in the final reel, no pointed glance at the audience, no moral delivered over the credits. The boy simply decides he wants to make people laugh, and the film takes his side. We have spent so long sorting films by the arguments they pick that a movie this content to merely charm can seem almost exotic. It is not ambitious. It is not instructive. It is, in its quiet way, a relief.