Le réseau Shelburn

During World War II several of the Hollywood studios made movies that dealt, in one way or the other, with the efforts of the French Resistance to sabotage the Germans before the arrival of the Allies on 6 June, 1944. The best known is certainly *Casablanca*, in which Rick and Louis go off at the end to join the Free French, i.e., Gen De Gaulle's small group of former French soldiers who had joined him in England after the French government, under Pétain, started to collaborate with the Germans. De Gaulle's forces were working with the Allies - more or less - to prepare the liberation of France. It is therefore significant that Rick specifies which resistance group he intends to join. Because, in fact, there were different resitance groups, with different political tendencies, most of which the Allies distrusted. Jean Moulin will eventually bring some, but not all, of those groups together. But suffice it to say that the resistance in France was in fact very fractured.

The politics of the difference Resistance movements get largely glossed over in this movie, which deals with a network that channeled downed Allied aviators through a small town in northern Brittany so that they could be sent back to England and returned to their work. It took close to two years to train a good fighter pilot, so every effort was made to return those shot down over occupied Europe to England so they could continue to serve the war effort.

The star of this movie, in every sense, is the lead actress, Alexandra Robert. She is not only the best actor in the movie, she also does a magnificent job of reading the narration.

The director, Nicolas Guillou, says that the movie is 90% faithful to the historical record and 10% fiction. In case that matters to you. It shouldn't. This isn't a documentary, though it is very much designed to glorify those who risked their lives in the resistance.

I don't know how understandable this movie will be to Americans who have not studied the French Resistance in detail. It does not paint a particularly flattering picture of the Allied aviators - though evidently a fairly accurate one. They were notorious for not thinking about risks the French were taking to get them back to England, and sometimes did very careless things that got their saviors in trouble.