Gerard Jugnot as Pigoil in "Paris 36," Sony Pictures Classics, 2008

After the deliberate ugliness of "Observe and Report," the sight of fake snow falling on a set of Parisian rooftops at night feels like an immodest luxury. Those movie flakes are just one of the artificial touches in Christophe Barratier's backstage melodrama "Paris 36," and for a while, the obvious sets and the old-movie conventions are pleasing.

The film, set during 1936 in the Parisian district of Faubourg (the French title is "Faubourg 36") concerns a neighborhood music hall that falls under control of the district's shady gangster boss. His plan to demolish it and make a killing on the prime location throws the actors and stagehands out of work. After four months on the pavement, they take a lesson from the election of Léon Blum and the emergence of the Popular Front, occupying the theater and convincing M. Grand to let them try to make a go of it.

It's all terribly sentimental, predictable and, at two hours, much, much too long. The charm leaks out and the melodramatic plot lines lose the zip they need to keep us involved. Barratier doesn't understand that sometimes charm depends on maintaining a small scale. He can't resist staging a Busby Berkley production number, even though it throws us out of the world of this small neighborhood theater he's been working to establish.

And the film contains a distortion of history worth noting. No one goes to a pop melodrama deliberately aping movies of another time with the expectation of political nuance. But it should be said that the divisions in '30s France weren't as simple as the good-hearted socialists against the incipient fascists. Barratier, quite rightly, notes the anti-Semitism of the French right wing. But watching "Paris 36," you'd never know that some of the same anti-Semitism came from the socialist faction headed by Paul Faure, who, opposing Blum's anti-Nazism, argued for appeasement in order to avoid war. The end of the movie skips from 1936 straight to 1945 and the aftermath of the Occupation. You need to look elsewhere to know that at least part of what empowered the Nazis were the fears of some of the same people shown here as the friend of the common man.

Charles Taylor is our guest critic for the month of April.

"Observe and Report" opens in wide release on April 10th; "Paris 36" is now playing in New York and Los Angeles.

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