This is surprisingly the one of the worst movie I've watched in last six months. Surprise ,cos IMDb point is 7.5,Omer Sharif is on cast.I thought Turkish Muslim supermarket owner Ibrahim is pedophilia...but no he is so good man that he gives Jewish guy to read Koran.This movie stinks of religious propaganda and surprisingly is a French film.I think movie made to sell Islamic countries.Anyway stupidity not only what they try to em- pose ,film itself consist of many illogical things like Ibrahim shuts dawn his shop to take the boy to Turkey with a tiny car from France to Turkey.Actually he buys this car for him.He catches him stealing but not acts etc.It is total time wasting to watch this movie.

a seductive film. first for its flavor. a delicate - precise adaptation. and the bricks of an Oriental fairy-tale. one of impressive roles of Omar Shariff and a wise speech about values, truth and deep side of happiness. a film about friendship as key of life sense. a movie about small things. and about the root - book of each existence. a form of delight and wise manner to discover reality. and inspired art to use symbols - the clouds, the dance, the books. one of that adaptations who makes the source better, giving to it a special form of light, new nuances, more convincing marks. short, a good occasion of reflection and meeting with rare form of beauty of images, dialogs and atmosphere. an oasis, remembering cultural lines, inspiring peace and refined optimism.

This movie is billed as a warm, feel good movie. The Omar Sharif character is kindly, but the lead character, Momo, a boy in his early teens, has the emotional rug suddenly and catastrophicallly yanked out from under him five times in the movie. He handles this with relative aplomb, but as a viewer I was left gasping.You would think a movie about a single older man who befriends a young teen and takes him to the steam bath and gives him money would necessarily have sexual overtones, but it just never comes up. The movie is set in a more innocent time. There is plenty of sex in the movie, but all heterosexual.

Storytelling is not a simple affair. Unless all you want to do is fill space, it is not enough to just take one or two (usually two) characters and draw them as they draw their situations. I know that some matchbook writer schools say to do just that, but our imaginations need more to get engaged.I do not know the book from which this originates, but I am rather sure that it didn't take the storytelling shortcuts we see in the movie. In fact, I think we can reconstruct the book's backbone from artifacts we have left, strewn throughout the movie.We have a bookish father, a rather serious scholar who is trapped in a menial job, probably in a book-related enterprise. We can infer as well that his Jewishness is what sets the barrier to advancement and produces the later termination and suicide. We have a decidedly non- bookish son, it seems someone actually dull. So instead of the father passing wisdom from his books to the son, we have a disconnect.The son is the narrator, more precisely the narrator is tied to the son's vision. Because that vision is broken, the narrator is untrusted, and we see two versions of a story after the piggybank affair: one in which he remains poor and another in which he lives a fantasy with a prostitute.That untrusted nature pervades the story itself: there is a story about an older son, someone whose existence even the shopkeeper acknowledges. We in fact see a photo of two children. But in a remarkable scene, the mother returns and the boy presents his own, contrary, story while she speaks similarly.So at root, it is a book about books: The "Jewish" (and western) books don't connect. In fact, they are sold to procure sex. The Koran does connect, and much is made of our boy's receiving and adopting it. It connects not because if its intrinsic content, but because a human (a "sufi" shopkeeper) created the bond. Along the way, we see our otherwise poor student become a master teacher when helping pass the driver's test.So we'd have a book about warring books, connecting with the reader through personal metaphor just as the story within connects the personal through books. I call this "folding," and imagine it to have been the construction of the original book. But none of that is here. All of it has been washed away and replaced with actor's mannerisms, disconnected scenarios and cheap sentiment. Sharif should have known better, especially if he understood the story.Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.