E-Mail This Article to a Friend Still the sheik Omar Sharif in Monsieur Ibrahim BY GERALD PEARY

Rudolph Valentino pretended to be one in The Sheik (1921) and The Son of the Sheik (1926), though he was Italian-bred, but it wasn’t until the 1960s screen ascendancy of Omar Sharif that the West possessed a genuine Arabic heart throb. Alexandria-born in 1932, Sharif was a sex symbol in Egyptian melodramas from 1954 to 1962, before his inspired casting in Lawrence of Arabia (1962) as Sherif Ali, T.E.’s macho-but-loyal Arab ally. Dark-eyed and deliriously handsome and with an exotic accent, Sharif was steered quickly away from the oasis of Islamic roles. Gone international, he played, among many romantic leads in the 1960s, the lady-killer physician in Doctor Zhivago (1965), Barbra’s Jewish gangster squeeze, Nicky Arnstein, in Funny Girl (1968), and the exiled revolutionary Che Guevara in Che! (1969).

However, the next three decades found the sexy desert fox treading water in meaningless costume dramas and sluggish TV movies, taking his dough and marching with far more purpose to the bridge table. There, Sharif reigned as one of the world’s great contract players. It’s been years and years since anyone noticed him in a meaningful movie. Maybe that explains the ridiculous to-do by the press — Omar’s Second Coming? — over his modest performance in Monsieur Ibrahim et les fleurs du Coran, the pleasant French-language film opening this Friday at the Kendall Square.

For Monsieur Ibrahim, Sharif’s polished, jet-set Monte Carlo look is dirtied down a bit. He sports a four-day beard, and there are gaps in his teeth, so he makes some sense as a weary Parisian grocery-store owner. But beyond agreeing to the cosmetic alterations, he really doesn’t push his acting much in Monsieur Ibrahim. Now in his 70s, Sharif still looks good in the frame, and he brings a certain command to the part just by showing up.

To me, that’s a saving grace, the absence of shtick in a role that in the wrong performer’s hands (Roberto Benigni’s, for example) could be a long bumpy night of scenery chomping and grandstanding. It’s all there waiting to be exploited in Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt’s sticky 2001 novella and play about a lovable old Muslim who reads the Koran for daily wisdom, who adopts a Jewish boy, who dances the Sufi dance, and who says such things as "the Seine likes bridges, like a woman who’s crazy about bracelets." But the film from writer/director François Dupeyron goes easy on Ibrahim’s philosophizing, gives dignity and elegance to the scene of Sufi whirlers, and keeps the sentimentality subdued.

Set in the early ‘60s and drawing inspiration from François Truffaut’s Les quatre cents coups (1959), the Nouvelle Vague–lite story finds a sensitive Parisian adolescent boy, Moses (Pierre Boulanger, a less obsessive Jean-Pierre Léaud), more-or-less abandoned by distracted parents. Outside Ibrahim’s grocery store, a movie is being shot in the street; it’s unnamed but unmistakably Jean-Luc Godard’s Le mépris/Contempt (1963), with the familiar red convertible, a Michel Piccoli look-alike in the driver’s seat, and an unnamed blonde star (Isabelle Adjani in a wig) who can only be Brigitte Bardot.

Moses shares a Paris flat with a self-absorbed, workaholic lawyer dad (Gilbert Melki) who’s been morose since his wife left them. Craving erotic contact, Moses patronizes the local whores even as he pines for the neighborhood nice Jewish girl, Myriam (Lola Naymark). His father leaves him and Myriam cheats on him, so Moses turns all his attention to the rock of his life, Ibrahim. There’s an adoption, Jewish Moses becomes Muslim Momo, and the two of them decide to embark on the Road of Life. Adieu, Paris!

There’s a dreadful cutesy part where Ibrahim learns to drive and gets a license. But the auto trip across Europe is handled as economically as a 10-day-wonder grade-C movie (shots only of the sky as they traverse Albania and Greece). And who can resist all those otherworldly landscapes as they tool through eastern Turkey, Ibrahim’s homeland? One can almost forgive the so-so bland ending.

CONGRATULATIONS to local filmmaker Andrew Bujalski for winning the "Someone To Watch" Award at the Independent Spirits ceremony February 28 for his delicious first feature, Funny Ha Ha. Let’s hope the Brattle or the Coolidge gives it a run.

Gerald Peary can be reached at gpeary@world.std.com