Starring Omar Sharif and Pierre Boulanger. In French with English subtitles. Rating unavailable.

Although it's supposedly based on an autobiographical play by coscreenwriter Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt, if one didn't know any better, one would assume that Monsieur Ibrahim was a narrative riff on Madame Rosa. In 1977's Rosa, an adolescent Arab boy named Momo (short for Mohammed) is raised by a world-weary but loving ex-prostitute (played by the aging Simone Signoret); in the newer film, an adolescent Jewish boy (also nicknamed Momo, even though his name is actually Moses) is spiritually adopted by a world-weary but loving Arab shopkeeper (played by the aging Omar Sharif) after his real father abandons him. As if these similarities were not already striking enough, Moses/Momo (Pierre Boulanger) lives in the red-light district of Paris, where the world-weary but loving prostitutes attend to his every need.

If you haven't figured it out yet, Monsieur Ibrahim is meant to be a feel-good coming-of-age story borne aloft by an inspirational subtext of Muslim-Jewish friendship in the modern world (or at least in the 1960s; the story unfolds several years before the outbreak of the Six Day War).

In case we're still insufficiently uplifted, director-cowriter Franí§ois Dupeyron lards the score with great '60s songs--at least one of which was recorded several years after the film's ostensible time frame--and crowds the screen with period costumes and dances (especially the Madison).

At one point, a scene from Jean-Luc Godard's Le Mépris is supposedly being shot on Momo's street, with a blond-wigged Isabelle Adjani standing in for Brigitte Bardot (which could, incidentally, be the film's one clever touch; Bardot is now strongly associated with Jean-Marie Le Pen's anti-immigrant National Front, while Adjani is of partial Algerian descent).

Monsieur Ibrahim, in other words, is a film for people who like French-flavoured Stanley Kramer movies. Those who don't, however, should stay the hell away.