Set for the most part against the backdrop of a Paris ghetto circa the early 1960s, Monsieur Ibrahim et les fleurs du Coran ("Coran" being the French spelling for the Koran) is an agreeable coming-of-age fable in the Tony Gatlif vein. Moses "Momo" Schmitt (Pierre Boulanger), an artless Jewish youth accustomed to holding down the fort while his father sweats away in an office for a piddling wage, regularly purloins items from the grocery run by "the Arab," Monsieur Ibrahim (Omar Sharif, poised for a substantial comeback), who goes easy on the lad when he at last confronts him about his shoplifting: "Better you steal from me than steal somewhere else." Soon the Arab is giving Momo advice--some of it solicited, more of it part and parcel of the social contract between the wise and the naïve--on money and women, and if there's anyone whose advice on money and women you should heed, it's Omar Sharif. Before mortality and spirtuality become opaque spectres in Momo's process of maturation, Monsieur Ibrahim et les fleurs du Coran is a transporting, pop-hued period piece brimming with "local" colour--including worldly streetwalkers, from whom Momo gets a crash course in the birds and the bees--straight out of the collective unconscious. Which is to say that the picture eventually turns parched-looking and strange-feeling, even as it remains inherently predictable. (Think of a more subversive Finding Forrester with a third act set in Turkey.) The film's conclusion is oddly disturbing in its implication not of torches passed but bodies possessed--an extreme reading, to be sure, yet I can't think of a better way to convey the melancholy that suffuses the sticky closing shot.-Bill Chambers