This is a great film, though i was relegated to watching it on YouTube.. with a 4 second delay between sound and sight. Apart from thinking it uniquely captures the spirit of the time, I am mostly just left wondering if M. Mercouri along with a fair bit of the "female" cast were transgender. So instead of accusing her/him of "overacting", I'd tend to call it passion forged on the anvil of painful experience.., which in a sense might even be called the theme of the entire movie.

This is a delicate film on a delicate story, all true, the story of the author Romain Gary and his mother, a very determined but hopelessly impractical woman, who by her imagination tricks herself and her son through impossible difficulties in Leningrad, Poland and France from after the revolution to the second world war. It's one of the most famous mother portraits in the history of literature, and the film renders it justice on the whole. Jules Dassin was himself from a Russian Jewish family, he knew this background and environment by heart, and Melina Mercouri is perfect as the total mother. Jules Dassin plays himself the silent screen star and director in Leningrad and succeeds in having fun in quite a few comedy scenes. Some scenes are simply overwhelming in their human candor and beauty and are very appropriate illustrations of the book. Romain Gary himself would have been pleased with this film - it would be interesting to know if he said anything about it.

Based on novelist Romain Gary's biography,this is a good film by Jules Dassin .Melina Mercouri may ham it up,but here with good results for her character of a Jewish mom is really convincing,and it's the main asset of Dassin's work.The director was succumbing to the vices of European cinema of the era: the slow motion sequences ,which were very trendy then are almost unbearable today.Romain is played by no less than three different actors:Didier Haudepin (Romain at 15) was famous for his sensational part of the young boy of "les Amitiés Particulières" and Assi (aka Assaf) Dayan (Romain at 25) played opposite Anjelica Huston in the latter's father's "A walk with love and death" released the same year.Through the pleasure and the pain,through the years she came and went...Portrait of a mother .This is probably my favorite performance by M.Mercouri.

This movie should have been called An overbearing mother. Not very enjoyable as Melina Mercouri just kills every scene with her overacting.Filmed in different styles (sometimes like a silent movie) in which it tries to reproduce the Twenties setting. The music by the usual dependable Delerue is also a disappointment.