Based on his performance in the French drama Monsieur Ibrahim, Omar Sharif may successfully be cast as Yoda in the next Star Wars film. Sage and stooped despite his height, the Islamic shopkeeper of the title is a sort of banal Jedi master. Except that instead of peddling the Force, he dispenses homilies from his trusty Koran.

Sharif, seemingly walking the comeback trail, can also be seen this month in Hidalgo, although his maladroit performances in both films reinforce the difference between being prolific and just suddenly busy. Despite his famous (and now craggy) Cheshire cat grin, he's frankly out-acted here by his young co-star, Pierre Boulanger. Boulanger plays Momo, a burgeoning juvenile delinquent in 1960s Paris struggling to cope with a distant father and absentee mother -- not to mention some seriously raging hormones, which invariably provide coming-of-age dramas with their narrative impetus.

François Dupeyron's film is set in an explicitly movie-land Paris where the prostitutes are always glamorous and nurturing, and Brigitte Bardot look-alikes pout their way through open movie shoots. When he's not scoping out the babes, Momo hangs out at Monsieur Ibrahim's corner store, where much epigrammatic wisdom is enthusiastically dispensed.

The movie has weightier matters on its mind than mere cross-generational bonding, however, and fate (also known as "contrivance") sends the pair away from Gay Paree when the time comes for their shared journey of discovery. The destination is Turkey, ostensibly to rediscover M. Ibrahim's roots (which is odd since he rarely shuts up about his connection to his culture). No matter: the reasons for this trip have only to do with adhering to the upper-middlebrow festival-film template, which states that the only lessons worth learning occur someplace photogenic. These final scenes are lovely to look at, but otherwise interminable, bludgeoning what had been a disposable (if affable) prestige trifle into an audience orgy of eye-rolling and watch-checking.

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