Yves Jeuland’s documentary “Being Jewish in France,” which begins a one-week run on Wednesday at the Walter Reade Theater, is more than three hours long, and its emotional peak comes relatively early, when the film revisits the deplorable treatment of France’s Jewish population immediately before and during the Vichy years.

Mr. Jeuland’s juxtaposition of archival material with the 70-year-old memories of people who lived through that period makes the episode doubly painful: once for the initial cruelty, once for the depth and endurance of the scars. Robert Badinter, a former French minister of justice who is Jewish, reveals a lot about those scars when he shares his boyhood recollections of Marshal Pétain’s ignominious ascendance.

“Idolatry of Marshal Pétain everywhere,” he recalls bitterly. “Pictures of Pétain everywhere. That bleating old man in every newsreel.”

Nothing else in the film matches the power of the Vichy segment — what could? — and Mr. Jeuland makes the contrast all the more pronounced with what seems, at least to an American viewer, like an undifferentiated, grab-bag approach to the years since the war’s end. A dumb slur from a TV comedy or a poorly worded offhand remark by a politician gets roughly the same attention as a synagogue bombing as Mr. Jeuland brings his century-long survey up to the present.

His aim is to draw a through-line from the Dreyfus affair at the turn of the last century (in which, amid much ugly debate, a Jewish officer in the French military was convicted and later cleared of espionage) to recent anti-Semitism. It’s not entirely successful because of the frequent shifts in focus and scale, but maybe that’s the overriding point: when a country goes through the experience of devouring its own, as happened during the Vichy years, everything for generations after is going to be seen through that prism.

BEING JEWISH IN FRANCE

Opens on Wednesday in Manhattan.

Written and directed by Yves Jeuland; narrated by Mathieu Almaric; directors of photography, Jérôme Mignard and Christophe Petit; edited by Sylvie Bourget; music by Eric Slabiak; produced by Michel Rotman; released by the National Center for Jewish Film. At the Walter Reade Theater, 165 West 65th Street, Lincoln Center. In French, with English subtitles. Running time: 3 hours 5 minutes. This film is not rated.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/13/movies/13bein.html?ref=todayspaper&pagewanted=print

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