Just an Illusion

Olivier Nakache and Éric Toledano have been the most commercially dependable partnership in French cinema since The Intouchables in 2011, following it with Samba, C'est la vie! and The Specials. Just an Illusion turns back the clock to the mid-1980s and to a Jewish family of North African origin in the suburbs west of Paris. Gaumont released it in April 2026, it drew close to two million admissions in France, and it was later programmed in the Perlak section at San Sebastián.

The centre of the film is Vincent, played by the newcomer Simon Boublil, a boy on the cusp of thirteen with a bar mitzvah to prepare for. Louis Garrel and Camille Cottin play his quarrelling parents, a couple trying to keep their footing in a period of economic crisis; Alexis Rosenstiehl is the older brother Arnaud, and Pierre Lottin the caretaker of their housing estate. The film was shot in the Yvelines and at the Bry-sur-Marne studios, with Jean Rabasse's production design and Isabelle Pannetier's costumes doing the period work, and a score by the Manchester jazz trio GoGo Penguin.

French critics were generous, with an average of 3.8 out of 5 across more than forty reviews on Allociné, and the audience response was stronger still: it holds a Letterboxd average of 3.81 across more than sixty thousand ratings. It is a family chronicle that belongs with Au revoir les enfants and Belfast among films that look back at childhood through the particular history of a place and a community.