A Malformed Family Portrait Set During May 1968

Set during the May 1968 revolution in Paris, Lionel Baier’s “The Safe House” is a comic family portrait filled with ideas that never fully cohere. The film is based on Christophe Boltanski’s Prix Femina-winning biographical novel of the same name, a fact of which we’re reminded numerous times via authorial voiceover. Its snappy, postmodern unfurling, rife with intentionally obvious rear projections, does eventually give way to moving dimensions as the family’s history fades into view, but few political or personal elements amount to anything poignant.

Although Boltanski’s family serves as fuel for the screenplay, “The Safe House” anonymizes them and tilt-shifts some of the story’s details, while keeping the broad premise intact: a saga unfolding in the margins of one of France’s most pivotal modern protests. It’s told, at least initially, through the eyes of a nine-year-old boy (Ethan Chimienti), meant to be Boltanski himself. However, despite this narrative pretext — which may have excused some malformed musings as the interpretations of a child — the film often eschews the character’s point of view, and even Chimienti’s firecracker performance, in favor of a more scattered telling, with little sense of the family’s broader dynamics.

As the narrator discusses “The Safe House” from the top down, we’re introduced to the boy’s enterprising uncles — the younger (Aurélien Gabrielli), a visual artist, and the older (William Lebghil), an academic — as well as his idiosyncratic grandparents (Michel Blanc and Dominique Reymond), and his flamboyant great-grandmother (Liliane Rovère), an immigrant from Odessa. Although the family’s Jewish background becomes a key focus in the second half, it comes up only on occasion during the introductory scenes, in the form of vague allusions and the aspersions cast by haughty neighbors.

The propulsive, distantly Jacques Tati-style energy of these initial scenes provides just enough of a foothold for the story, before the broader politics in backdrop yank the young boy’s parents (Adrien Barazzone, Larisa Faber) away from the domestic setting. They are, unfortunately, a non-presence to begin with, not unlike the cramped house the family shares. The voiceover harps on its importance as a physical place, but the camera rarely captures it with a sense of space, or dynamism, or detail.

The sense of incidence with which May ’68 plays out, far in the background, speaks to a film for which the political is of little importance, or at least one that reflects the political through wry non-confrontations. But “The Safe House” does, in fact, establish the parameters of potent drama around the events, albeit without focusing on its specifics. Instead, the family’s history as Jews under Nazi occupation is echoed at first through the grandfather’s apparent PTSD (an element that appears as suddenly as it fades) and through flashbacks that draw flimsy similarities between the two time periods. All that seems to connect them is the movement of history — the idea that “something” is happening, even though neither time period is depicted with a sense of greater history, or even intimate personal significance.

While the film unfolds at a remove from its characters, Baier does at least conjure spirits of the past through some of his performances. Blanc, in particular, is quite moving. Yet the family’s story is seldom grounded by this haunting history. Moments in which 1968 feels more than nominally tethered to the 1940s are few and far between, and even the phantasmagorical appearance of a key World War II figure can’t materialize these connections.

There’s a mischief to how the film is introduced, and a sense of somber occasion to how it proceeds. However, both these halves are only truly bound by Diego Baldenweg, Nora Baldenweg and Lionel Baldenweg’s jazz-heavy score, in which familiar sounds shift in tone. Visually, and thematically, “The Safe House” can’t quite live up to its hints of accomplished sonic storytelling, and too often skips between modes of expression, unable to fully capture the weight of experience, and the burden of personal and cultural memory.