Not very well known, but still the winner of several film awards as director, actress and screenwriter, Zabou Breitman is the daughter of the fairly recognisable, if second-rank, actor, director and screenwriter Jean-Claude Deret…

Not very well known, but still the winner of several film awards as director, actress and screenwriter, Zabou Breitman is the daughter of the fairly recognisable, if second-rank, actor, director and screenwriter Jean-Claude Deret, a descendant of baptised Jews from Russia. Zabou's mother is the actress Céline Léger, daughter of the barrister Yury Kagan and Elena Berman, a graduate of the Moscow Conservatoire. Zabou's former husband is a Parisian sculptor. The children are actors too. The daughter is the singer and performer Anna Chalon, the son the actor and director Antonin Chalon, who appeared in a supporting role in "Persian Lessons".

On the whole, the entire family is bound up with music, cinema and the arts. As though someone had once mastered a certain trade and then spread it, very smoothly, in a thin layer over the sandwich of his family.

I cannot say that I had ever given much thought to this not uninteresting, if rather unremarkable in its line of work, family, but recently in a French magazine I read an interview with Zabou Breitman, timed to coincide with her 65th birthday, in which, speaking of her children, she describes how she took the birth of her granddaughter: "Magnifique! C'est un peu comme les poupées russes", that is, "Magnificent! It's a bit like Russian dolls".

In the first place, it is of course telling that after several generations of Frenchification the Russian trace is still very much perceptible. And in the second, you know, there is probably no better metaphor than the matryoshka for describing the succession of generations and dynasties of this kind, where each new generation literally copies the achievements of the last.