"Meet the Barbarians" review: Julie Delpy strikes gold on fearlessly funny comedy
DAY 1: TIFF 2024 REVIEW 2
“Meet the Barbarians” was internationally premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival.
The small town of Paimpoint is preparing for the arrival of six Ukrainian refugees but everyone in France has already rushed to take them in — so they wind up instead with the Fayads, a family of Syrians. Liberal school teacher Joelle (Julie Delpy, Before Sunrise) fights hard for their acceptance, and the townspeople are both curious and suspicious. Are the refugees robbing them of their hard-earned tax dollars? Why don’t the Fayad women wear veils? Naturally, the town’s teenage boys are most concerned about whether the incoming daughter their age is pretty (though they worry her father will cut off their hands should they touch her).
It’s a tall order to create a comedy about refugees without being insensitive or moralizing, and Meet the Barbarians manages to be neither. It’s refreshingly un-preachy, upfront, and unafraid delve into the uncomfortable. The townspeople are openly racist — to gain town sympathy, the Fayads must re-enact their war trauma in a show-and-tell from hell with bomb footage in the background which gets interrupted by white nationalists who arrive on scene, bearing flags and all. This should be bleak and it is – but somehow, Delpy makes it funny too. “Say no to fascism!,” she screams into a megaphone, ever the well-intentioned white liberal.
It’s easily one of the funniest things I’ve seen in years, and humor is pulled from people saying and doing very human things whether it’s the wronged wife attacking her husband with a sausage or a disgruntled grandfather expressing his discontent with French crepes. There’s no shortage of tenderness here either: there’s a really touching moment in which one of the town’s teenage boys reads the Fayad daughter a poem in Arabic. Watching them trade shy glances at the bus stop and fall in love is sure to delight even the most cold-hearted cynic.
The movie might end with a tad bit too much optimism but I refuse to complain. It makes sense: Meet the Barbarians is stubborn, fearless, determined to connect at all costs. If it’s bursting with a little too much heart, it’s only because, like in Before Sunrise, Julie Delpy believes that God doesn’t live in any of us, but in the charged little spaces in between. Thirty years later, with Meet the Barbarians, she finds that intimacy again with the townspeople of Paimpont. Whether they’re clicking or clashing, or falling in love or out of it, they’re connecting — and that’s not only a special thing, but an outright divine one too.