User Reviews

We are told by a woman talking to the camera it is 2058. She cannot forget an incident that marked her life that took place fifty years before. In flashbacks, we are taken to a poor area of the Paris of 2009. The neighborhood is basically full of immigrants. The police is looking for illegal aliens wherever they can find to deport them. Among the would be deportees is Milana, a twelve year old Chechen girl.

Milana is part of a group led by Blaise, an intense boy that is involved in pirating CDs and DVDs. Only Blaise and his sister, Alice, seem to have been born of French parents. Most of the other kids are the children of parents that have come to France from other countries without a legal status. Blaise learns about the possibility that his friend Milana will suffer such a fate, so he becomes involved in making her stay.

Blaise's mother, Cendrine, gets involved in trying to save the children facing deportation by offering to take Milana home with her. She even takes a group of the children to the country and to the beach. When the situation becomes tense as a woman commits suicide and the police start raiding the area, Blaise and the group decide to barricade themselves in order to protect Milana. Finally, one of the boys that knew about their plan is instrumental for getting them out of hiding. The good news is that Milana's case has been solved and she can remain in France.

An entertaining film by Romain Goupil, who also appears in it. The world of the illegal immigrants is examined from the children's point of view. They would never betray one of their own, protecting them no matter what. The film makes a case of the human tragedy desperate people will get into, trying to make it better for their children in a safer place than the one they left behind. In an epilogue, an older Blaise tells us how much he always remembers that period of his childhood, never having forgotten Milana.

Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi plays Cendrine. The stars are the children though. There are wonderful appearances by Jules Ritmanic and Linda Doudaeva, as Blaise and Milana.

A film that concerns itself with the issue of residents without documentation in France, Les Main en l'Air has the good taste not to besiege us with didactic speech-making, and approaches the subject from a thoroughly human angle, through a retrospective account of a touching and melancholy friendship between a twelve-year-old French boy and a girl of Chechen culture who are beginning to understand each other as more than chums. Alternating between insouciance and gravity, play and fear, Romain Goupil's film creates wonders with its scenes of secret meetings of a group of young schoolmates, full of freshness and nostalgia, thanks to well-written dialog and appealing comedy.