Monsieur Ibrahim
It's a good time to be Omar Sharif.
The Egyptian-born actor and thinking-woman's sex symbol of "Lawrence of Arabia" and "Funny Girl" has been away from the screen for far too long, content to be merely one of the world's leading authorities on the game of bridge. Yet here he is twice in two weeks, playing a canny, sympathetic desert sheik in the too-tall-tale horse-race epic "Hidalgo" -- my colleague Wesley Morris called it "Sandbiscuit," and I can't beat that -- and now in the title role of Francois Dupeyron's bittersweet coming-of-age saga "Monsieur Ibrahim."
Sharif won both a best actor Cesar (France's Oscar) and the audience award at the Venice Film Festival for "Ibrahim," and that's testament to the affection in which this treasure of the cinema is rightly held. It's certainly not for the movie, which is very nice and very familiar.
We're in early-'60s Paris -- "Woolly Bully" on the soundtrack -- in a back street called Rue Bleue, where the grizzled Ibrahim runs a flyspecked grocery store and where, across the way, a motherless Jewish boy named Momo (Pierre Boulanger) is trying to grow up as fast as possible. This includes breaking open his piggy bank so he can lose his virginity to one of the local streetwalkers, a development that Hollywood would spin an entire feature out of but which is dispatched in the first five minutes here. Hey, it's France.
Momo chafes under the law laid down by his humorless, book-obsessed father (Gilbert Melki), and his small rebellions include shoplifting sardines from the store across the street. He rationalizes this by telling himself he's only stealing from an Arab, but, as if reading his mind, Ibrahim responds that he's no Arab but an Anatolian Sufi from Turkey. And furthermore, "if you have to steal, I prefer you do it in my shop."
To paraphrase Bogart, this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Spry, poetic, and given to the sort of twinkly folk wisdom found only in movies, Ibrahim mischievously assists Momo in his revolt against the patriachy -- a little cat food goes a long way when you're making dinner for Dad.
Then events take a somber turn, and the old soul is there to become a father figure in word and deed. Ultimately, Ibrahim leads Momo on a mind-expanding road trip through Europe to Istanbul, where the movie's best and least predictable moments unfold. By then, Momo has learned the joys of living for the moment, and Ibrahim has been forced by the script to spout such lines as "A man's heart is like a caged bird: When you dance, it sings and flies to heaven."
It takes skill to put over a wheezer like that and not have the audience firing Junior Mints at the screen. Maybe it's all the card playing, but Sharif never overplays his hand. Unshaven, gray, wearing a rumpled cardigan, the actor is far from the smoldering idol of bygone days, but he's fully at his ease, and he caresses the shopworn dialogue as if he'd come across it in the back of the store.
When Shirley MacLaine made this same movie, more or less, as "Madame Sousatzka," there was a whole lot of acting going on. Sharif brings us to Ibrahim with a modesty that oddly reminds you of why the actor is a legend.
An appealing breeze of the French New Wave blows through the film. As Momo, Boulanger has the guarded adolescent handsomeness of Jean-Pierre Leaud's Antoine Doinel in "The 400 Blows," and in one lovely sequence the Rue Bleue is enlivened by the crew of Jean-Luc Godard's "Contempt" shooting on a side-street location. Brigitte Bardot, played in a blurry carnal cameo by Isabelle Adjani, even pops into Monsieur Ibrahim's store for a bottle of water.
"Water isn't rare, mademoiselle," the old man assures her. "True stars are."
Exactly so.
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