‘Meet the Barbarians’ Review: Julie Delpy’s Sharp French Comedy Gives Equality and Fraternity a Workout

Until its full plot unfolds, viewers are likely to assume “Meet the Barbarians” is a sweetly nostalgic comedy. And in some ways, they’d be right. Director Julie Delpy structures her new film as a fairy tale, going so far as to introduce the action with a literal “Once upon a time in Paimpont …”

She gives us a delightful setting, heroes and villains, five distinct acts and a strong moral lesson. But while the tale is timeless, the time is two years ago. And Paimpont, a charming hamlet in Brittany, could be any number of small towns or big cities today.

Paimpont happens to be an ancient village so tiny, everyone is involved in every decision. When the film begins, the mayor, Sébastien (Jean-Charles Clichet), is proudly announcing a new initiative: Paimpont has decided to adopt a family of Ukrainian refugees. The whole town is vibrating with excitement, until they find out that they’ve been rejected. “Ukrainians are in high demand on the refugee market,” an abashed Sébastien explains to his disappointed constituents. But the local schoolteacher, Joëlle (Delpy), soon announces that the town has been assigned a Syrian family instead.

Much to her shock, the universal enthusiasm instantly deflates. “We have nothing against Arabs,” the local butcher insists, unconvincingly. The owner of the town restaurant, assuming the women will wear burqas, wonders just how veiled is too veiled. Schoolboys hear there will be a teen girl coming, and warn each other ominously that her father will cut their fingers off if they touch her.

Then the Syrians (including Ziad Bakri, Fares Helou and Rita Hayek) arrive, and everyone is relieved that they wear jeans and speak French. Before long, though, locals start to wonder why they deserve free housing, or food, or education. Petitions are passed around, whispers are shared, people talk about “saving our Breton soul.”

It’s hard to imagine that Delpy could make something unexpectedly lovely out of so much familiar fear and malice. But she shoots the movie like an old-fashioned comic drama: it’s warm and bright with a classical, and often whimsical, score to match. All of which, just as she intends, only makes the ugliness of what is actually happening more potent.

Her approach can feel heavy-handed. It’s clear from the start who the barbarians really are, and though the performances — by French vets like Sandrine Kiberlain, Laurent Lafitte, and Mathieu Demy — are perfectly pitched, few of the characters could be described as multi-layered.

Even so, Delpy’s intentional balancing act is an admirable and often effective one. She wrote the script with Matthieu Rumani and Nicolas Slomka, and by keeping the words sharp but the tone light she ultimately achieves her goal: to show us two sides of the same mirror. Paimpont has some cruel and small-minded people, but they sleep and shop and work alongside dreamers and poets and optimists (including a communist farmer played by her father, Albert Delpy).

We could, she observes, live in a world where everyone is unhappy: where women who try to enact change are called “hysterical” and “hormonal” by resentful men, and a police officer’s only defense of new neighbors is that at least they aren’t “gypsies.”

Or, she suggests, we could choose a world built on respect, generosity and humanity. In another movie, this wish fulfillment might feel cheaply unearned and flat-out unrealistic. But Delpy’s dichotomous qualities have been evident in all her work, from her “Before” collaborations with Richard Linklater and Ethan Hawke to the many films (including “Two Days in New York” and “Two Days in Paris”) that she’s directed herself.

Only a skeptical romantic could make a movie so minutely tailored to the best and worst of us, and succeed as well as she does. So yes, even people who don’t believe in fairy tales may leave hoping that Paimpont — and the world around it — can somehow inch a little closer to happily ever after.

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