Akin

Noah Selvaggio is a 79-year-old retired chemistry professor and widower living on Manhattan's Upper West Side. He is days from his first trip back to Nice, France, his birthplace, which he left at age four in 1942 and has never revisited. While sorting through the last papers of his late sister Fernande, he discovers nine puzzling black-and-white photographs from the early 1940s hidden in a magazine. The images are slapdash and obscure: a dandyish man with a cane, a cropped hotel facade, a couple on a bench seen from behind, a woman with coiled hair photographed from the rear (marked "MZ"), a close-up of what appears to be a rectangle with a circle and dashes, children's feet, tree roots, an empty street, and a smiling dark-haired boy (marked "RJ"). None bear the stamp of Noah's famous grandfather, the photographer Pierre Personnet, known by his artistic pseudonym Père Sonne.

Before Noah can leave, a social worker named Rosa Figueroa calls about Michael Young, Noah's young great-nephew. Michael's maternal grandmother has just died, his mother Amber Davis is in prison on drug charges, and his father Victor, Noah's nephew, died of a heroin and fentanyl overdose more than a year earlier. Noah is Michael's last known relative in New York. Rosa arranges a visit to Amber's correctional facility, where the young woman reluctantly signs a form designating Noah as temporary caretaker. Rosa pushes Noah to take Michael along to France, since no one else can look after him. Noah resists but agrees, and they rush to secure a passport.

Noah meets Michael at the passport office. The boy is small, guarded, and profane, carrying a backpack that holds all his possessions. Back at Noah's apartment, Michael demonstrates unexpected resourcefulness: using his phone's image-search function, he identifies one of the mystery photographs as the Hotel Excelsior in Nice, and Noah books a room there. As they prepare, Noah reads a new biography of Père Sonne and learns a troubling detail: A former housekeeper told a journalist that Noah's mother, Margot, had been absent from the family apartment for two nights in August 1944, worrying her elderly father. Noah also packs the Pick-Pick Bird, his grandfather's clockwork toy, to bring to Nice.

The overnight flight is Michael's first time on an airplane. They arrive in warm February sunshine and settle into the Excelsior, where their mismatched habits produce constant friction. Michael rejects French food, curses freely, and photographs dog excrement rather than the landmarks Noah recommends. They walk the Promenade des Anglais, Nice's famous seaside walkway, as Noah lectures about the city's history.

Noah discovers a plaque near the hotel revealing that between September 1943 and August 1944, the Nazis requisitioned the Hotel Excelsior to hold more than 3,000 Jews before transporting them to death camps. He is shaken to realize they are staying in a former site of the Holocaust and begins to fear that Margot's photograph of the hotel connects her to the occupation not as a victim but as an informer, one of the estimated million French civilians who passed information to the Germans.

At the Musée de la résistance azuréenne, Nice's Resistance museum, Michael spots a match for one of Margot's prints. The dandyish man with the cane is Maurice Brener, alias "Zazou," who supplied false papers to the Marcel Network, a group that hid hundreds of Jewish children from the Nazis. An archivist identifies the couple on the bench as Moussa Abadi and Odette Rosenstock, the network's founders. Noah is horrified, fearing his mother was surveilling these heroes for the enemy.

The breakthrough comes when the archivist calls back with information about a woman identified as M.Z., Marie Zabel, an obscure figure who forged documents for the Marcel Network. Michael connects the dots: "Marie Zabel" is a play on Margot Isabelle, just as Père Sonne was a play on Personnet. Margot was not a collaborator but a Resistance forger creating false identity documents for Jewish children. The revelation reframes everything. She photographed her comrades from behind to protect them. The cathedral bell tower, the tree roots, the children's feet, and the smiling boy all become fragments of her secret wartime life. She sent Noah away in 1942 not out of neglect but because her dangerous work demanded it.

Noah meets Coco Lamarche, the daughter of Margot's wartime housekeeper, who confirms that Margot returned after three days away badly injured, with a dislocated knee. Noah realizes his mother was arrested and tortured by the Nazis at the Excelsior. Her permanently damaged knee and the near-blindness in her left eye, which she always blamed on an infection, were consequences of interrogation. Michael raises the painful possibility that Margot broke under torture, which would explain why she vanished from the network and fled France. Noah acknowledges this is possible but notes that almost all the network's agents and hidden children survived.

Meanwhile, Noah pieces together the circumstances of Victor's death. He learns that arrestees are routinely pressured into becoming confidential informants and theorizes that Victor was released without charges on the night of Amber's arrest because he agreed to inform, while Amber took a five-year plea deal. Rosa confirms the suspicion, noting that Victor's autopsy showed no track marks except one fresh injection site behind his left knee, with no paraphernalia in the motel room. Noah concludes Victor was likely killed during a failed sting operation and resolves to visit Amber and hire a lawyer, deciding this truth is for Amber to learn first.

Carnival night provides both spectacle and crisis. A fellow spectator's foam ruins Père Sonne's antique fedora, and when Michael's handheld noise machine emits a gunshot sound in the crowded square, Noah stamps the device to pieces. Michael bolts into the night. Noah searches frantically before finding the boy calmly waiting in the hotel lounge. Later, Michael leaps from high rocks into the dark sea. Noah watches in terror until the boy backstrokes smoothly through the waves: He has been swimming at the YMCA since he was three.

On their last full day, Noah's eightieth birthday, Michael retrieves the ruined fedora from the trash, claiming it as his great-great-grandfather's hat. They climb the Colline du Château, Nice's hilltop cemetery, to visit Père Sonne's grave, then return a Roman helmet Michael stole from an archaeological museum earlier in the week. At a nursing home, they find Lucien Demetz, now 77, whose wartime alias was René Jacques, the boy marked R.J. in the photographs. Though affected by dementia, Lucien responds to the clockwork Pick-Pick Bird with recognition and confirms Margot's identity through her signature trick of touching her tongue to her nose. Noah leaves the bird with him.

Rosa's voicemail delivers the final turn. Amber's sister Grace, now in Cincinnati, cannot take Michael. Noah tells Michael plainly that his aunt cannot take him, so he will stay with Noah. He offers to move closer to Michael's old neighborhood and promises visits to Amber and to Cody, Amber's brother, who uses a wheelchair after being shot. Noah announces he is quitting smoking. In the taxi to the airport, Michael's head comes to rest on Noah's shoulder. Noah leans his own head against the boy's and says his thanks aloud, in French.