Lévy et Goliath (1987)

Paris, market day. Armed with his sniffing boar, Inspector Gendron of the narcotics squad unmasks a trafficker posing as a hunchback, but the man manages to escape. A world away from all this, the wedding of Moses and Sarah is being celebrated in “the Jerusalem of the North,” as Jews call the city of Antwerp. Moses is one of those scholars who impress the crowd by reciting a specified verse from memory when they open a Bible at random. As the orchestra plays the Song of the Samovar at the request of the widow Lévy, Albert appears at the festivities. Silence falls instantly, and Moses, icy, has no intention whatsoever of bridging the gap with his renegade brother, whom he holds responsible for their father’s death. As comfortable in his own world as he is uncomfortable with the opposite sex, Moses travels to Paris with his friend Nathan a few days after his wedding to deliver diamond dust to the Renault factories in Levallois-Perret. When a young woman, very worried by the police presence near the train, enters their compartment, the two men instantly hide their faces behind their hats. So they do not see her slip three packets of cocaine into Moses’s bag; she was carrying them to deliver to Goliath, a Parisian dealer. Since the bags of drugs look like the ones containing diamond dust, Moses simply gets them mixed up and delivers the cocaine to the Renault factories instead of the diamond dust. He leaves the real diamond dust with his uncle Mardochée, who is involved in the struggle to liberate Jews in the Soviet Union. That very evening, pursued by Goliath and his gang, Moses assumes they are KGB henchmen but decides to leave his speculations for later, fleeing blindly through the Paris night. After God leads him to a Pigalle hotel in the company of Charlotte, a prostitute who has mistaken him for a client, Moses calls on Albert, who was teaching a self-defense class. Albert rushes over and quickly strips his brother of the clothes and beard that make him too easily recognizable, just in time to pass him off as his own effeminate lover, François-Camille, and fool Goliath, who had tracked Moses down. The police stage a raid, and Goliath decides it is best to make himself scarce. In the van that picks them up, the two brothers meet “Bijou,” a cross-dresser who finds François-Camille very much to his taste. Taken into a separate room, Bijou turns out to be an inspector undercover in the scene, while the interrogation of the Lévy brothers leaves the unfortunate Inspector Gendron quite perplexed… Once released, the brothers go to Albert’s non-kosher café. Working as a deliveryman, Moses delivers an order to three young designers, including the alluring Malika, with whom he immediately hits it off. Goliath meets the same end as his biblical namesake. After the farewells, when the place is deserted, a black car pulls up and an elegant-looking man gets out. He asks the brothers whether the case they are carrying contains the powder, and when they answer yes, he takes it from them, tossing them another case, this one full of banknotes, and leaves after tersely saying to them… The Lévy brothers soon realize that they have inadvertently swindled the person who hired Goliath, but Albert thinks he needs the money to rebuild his café, while Moses intends to return to his own world. The camera pulls back as the brothers bicker, walking away toward the horizon.