Petit Nicolas - review

This French comedy, based on the best-selling illustrated books of Jean-Jacques Sempé and René Goscinny, may be an acquired taste for the British, who sometimes find Gallic charm a bit treacly. But writer-director Laurent Tirard’s film became a box-office champion in France as a family film.

Seizing bits and pieces of several stories, Tirard has set his story of a boy who is terrified that when his mother gives birth to a brother he will be removed from his family within its proper period. It’s a time when schoolchildren are innocently naughty and classrooms weren’t battlefields.

This is where the charm comes in and it tends to curdle until you get right into the film. Once over that hurdle, the playing of the kids, led by Maxime Godart, is wonderfully apt and Kad Merad and Valérie Lemercier as Nicolas’s bickering but loving suburban parents are equally good.

Yes, the film looks like some escapee from a gentler past, and you may flinch at first. But it triumphs in the end as a tribute to Sempé and Goscinny that may be light years behind something like Truffaut’s 400 Blows but inhabits territory all of its own.

Cert PG, 91 mins