The Family France, USA 2013 – 111min.

Movie Rating

Malavita

Movie Rating: Constantin Xenakis

The family of a former New York mobster goes into hiding in a French country village.

Every three months, Fred Blake’s family is forced to move from their home, city or country. The reason is that Fred (a.k.a. Giovanni Manzoni) has snitched on his mob colleagues and is living with a series of new identities under the protection of WITSEC. Finally moved to a small village in Normandy, after just one day the family goes back to its usual ways: the daughter beats up the little French boys who try to pick her up, the son runs a one-boy shake-down scam on his fellow pupils, and the mother blows up the local supermarket after being insulted by the manager and two old ladies. And the uncultured snitch Fred/Giovanni discovers a typewriter and decides to write his memoirs. Which ends up putting his wife and the WITSEC agent in charge of his safety under a lot of pressure...

Producer Luc Besson is a man to be admired: he has launched the careers of actors (Jean Réno, Jean-Marc Barr, Natalie Portman), managed to succeed on the American market, supported independent films and lined the coffers of French cinema with gold thanks to his blockbuster movies. Director and screenwriter Luc Besson, however, is less deserving of respect, as his movies’ level of quality is usually not that high. But this time around, Besson had the good idea of adapting the best-selling novel by Tonino Benacquista. Even though it apes more than pays homage to movies like Casino and Goodfellas, the daily life of Italian-American gangsters stuck in the French countryside is truly funny in quite a few scenes.

31.05.2021

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