Petit Nicolas

Rene Goscinny wrote and Jean-Jacques Sempe illustrated a series of children's comic books, first published in 1959. Director Laurent Tirard and his team of Franco-Belgian co-adaptors turned them into a live-action screenplay, et voila, they created the French box-office champion of 2009, Le petit Nicolas.

The world of eight-year-old Nicolas is middle-class provincial France in the 1950s. There are no black or Arabic faces in his classroom, or his city's streets. Even the lower-class kids are all-white. Adults are strange or buffoons, except for his class's young schoolteacher, who tries not to get exasperated with boys who are fat, sleepy, long-legged, aggressive or simply nicely egocentric, like Nicolas is.

When Nicolas's parents are discovered to be producing a second child, he panics. Rather than be cast aside, he must ensure the failure of the pregnancy. His classmates will help, of course.

This is a movie whose viewer will either feel it is charmingly, amusingly old-fashioned or insufferably, cloyingly cute. The provincial French obviously had the first viewpoint, dragging their grandchildren out to see and experience Les Good Old Days. The alternate viewpoint is mine: this movie's only bearable cuteness is its stick-up paper-cut credits.