Il silenzio del mare

Le silence de la mer (1949) is a French movie scripted and directed by Jean-Pierre Melville. This is an unusual film about the French Resistance. It's based on a story by a Resistance fighter whose code name was Vercors.

You would expect a movie about the French Resistance to be filled with clandestine raids and destruction of railroad tracks. This isn't that movie. The Resistance in this case is silence. When the German army occupied France, army officers were often billeted in private homes.

A German officer is billeted in the home of an uncle (Jean-Marie Robain) and his niece (Nicole Stéphane). Their method of resistance is to act as if the officer is invisible. They refuse to acknowledge his presence. The officer speaks French well, but they do not answer or even look up when he speaks.

That is the plot. You'll have to see the movie to learn how it turns out in the end. Even when the German officer speaks, he's quiet and respectful. This is probably the quietest non-silent film I've ever seen.

It's always written that Melville himself was in the Resistance. However, as far as I can tell, he escaped from France and joined the Free French Army, which wasn't the same thing. He participated in the war as a soldier in Italy. The author Vercors actually was in the Resistance, and wrote the story while fighting the Germans in France.

Like Citizen Kane, this movie had an effect on many films that followed it. Melville was a pioneer. He was never formally trained in cinema. His belief was that he had seen enough movies to know how to make them. And he made this movie in a way that produced impressive results.

Melville worked a generation before the auteurs of the French New Wave. However the New Wave directors respected and copied what he did. He's been called the godfather of the New Wave.

Melville made this movie on a shoestring budget, with scraps of film and no special lighting. His crew fit into a van--director, cinematographer, sound technician, and the three leading actors.

This movie worked well on the small screen. (We bought the Criterion Collection DVD, which included specials that revealed more about Melville and his style of filmmaking.)

It's hard to rate Le silence de la mer, because it's so different from other movies--even French movies about the Resistance. The film has a strong IMDb rating of 7.6, which I think is correct. I rated it 8.

"Le Silence De La Mer" is a film based on the novel of the same name written by Jean Bruller which was published secretly in Nazi-occupied France. The film plays like a video-book of the novel as most of the story is told either through narration or monologues. The film's such patience-testing style is quickly suggested by its opening scene which plays as if it literally drops the viewer inside the novel.

The film is told through two point of views. An old french man, who lives with his niece, and seems to be quite content with wealth and art. The other viewpoint is the Nazi soldier who stays in their house for a quite period of time. The key to delve into the former's mind is by his narration, and the latter's is by his monologues. It's an interesting dynamic which really shines and gets its point across over the course of time.

"Le Silence De La Mer" is Melville's debut feature, and it's fascinating how clear he is about the subject and style of the film. It's no wonder that his later films grew to be even more tightly constructed.

The film opens with lines which suggest that the feature is in no way constructed to present as a solution to conflict between France and Germany, but I'm sure both Bruller and Melville, and the rest of us would have wondered, "..but what if?".

"It is a noble thing for a soldier to disobey a criminal order."

The condition the main characters find themselves in seems on one hand absurd and existential, and on the other, to reveal such a timeless and menacing aspect of all war - the desire for one nation to essentially eliminate another. For most of the film, a German officer talks to a Frenchman and his niece about his life, his taste in the arts, and professes his admiration for French culture, all while they sit in stony silence, trapped in their own living room, but passively resisting his overtures to connect with them on a human level. His eyes are eventually opened to his country's plans and what they are really doing though. The novel the film was based on was written in occupied France and published secretly in 1942, which is a marvel on its own to think about.

The film by no means forgives the Nazis (and even includes a Treblinka reference the novel didn't have to emphasize that the Holocaust was known by at least some German officers), but it also shows that decent men exist in any enemy. In this terrible situation, it thus sets up fascinating questions: Should the Frenchman and his daughter engage with this man? Should he attempt to disobey his orders? Or does war simply crush those possibilities out of existence? That scene where the officer sees the monuments in Paris extolling the military triumphs of the past, for leaders and causes which ran their course and faded into oblivion, is brilliant. One sees the courage of the Resistance in these two quiet people in their home, the appeal to humanity under extraordinary circumstances, and the cruelty and senselessness of it all.

The first movie of one of the best and most influential directors of all time and it's already a wonderful achievement; even more impressive for the restrictions of the budget and a story that mostly happens in a single room with a constant monologue. The power of the storytelling of Melville, both in his adaptation of the famous clandestine novel (release during the Nazi occupation of France) and especially in a very solid, quiet and surprisingly mature direction, makes for an unforgettable trip, where you can't take your eyes from the screen. And the moving ending, with one of the most powerful shots in his filmography is as impressive today as the first time.

Here's the set-up: an uncle and his niece (the latter Nicole Stephane, who would appear as the female lead in Melville's follow-up Les Enfants Terribles) are living in a small town in France and it's the early part of the war in 1941. A German officer is wounded and has to spend some time to heal (not serious enough for a hospital it would seem, but not strong enough to fight yet), and immediately things are tense as the French citizens refuse to say a word or even look up - their own form of silence as protest - but he doesn't mind.

Officer Werner von Ebrancc in fact will talk to them or, perhaps, in a way, to himself without any regard. For the most part, with maybe just one or two minor exceptions, we only hear the uncle in voice-over. Lots and lots of voice-over, narrating about things that we see on screen and what the officer's silence holds over moments, or when he does things like play the harmonium - a melody that his niece hasn't played in years. So much significance in six months or so of this man just *being* there. What will they do? Will communication finally happen vocally, or with physical gestures and things like hands?

I imagine it'll be the same for those who come to La Silence de la Mer that admirers (does one say fans perhaps) of Jean-Pierre Melville's other films, primarily his 60's crime thrillers or the other WW2 resistance epic Army of Shadows: this does not really seem very much like those later movies. In 'Silence', it's got wall-to-wall musical score for one thing by Edgar Bischoff; not a bad score by any means, but it is strange and sometimes the music is accompanying one of the many monologues delivered by the German soldier Werner, which is in contrast to many of Melville's films which lack music in favor of silence. And there is a great deal of narration from the French uncle (just credited as 'L'Oncle' played Robain) which is also in contrast with Melville's style. So it was a little jarring to come to his first film after seeing so many - this doesn't make it a bad thing, just different and unexpected.

The context always matters of course: this was made very soon after the end of the second world war, which Melville fought in and was part of the French resistance. The film's adapted from a book, which is pretty clear by not only the framing (like a Cocteau film of Beauty and the Beast, which gets checked here in reference by the way by Werner, it opens and ends with a book on screen), and it was a book that was kind of an underground release. Melville even adapted it without the rights, something that would almost make it a "fan-film" today, though Vecors liked it enough to let it see release following approval from a 'jury' (see the trivia). But the point is that the film must have been something important to see in France at the time, part of France looking back at what had happened to them, what they allowed, and of course the fervent, dastardly German/Nazi mind-set, and take some steps to move forward.

The narration may be too much at times (it's part of Melville's 'anti-cinematic' aesthetic in relation to adapting a book to the tee), and at first I was bothered by it. It made the film seem old and dated. But as the film went on and I got more into Vernon's performance, it seemed to make more sense about the tension and how, step by step, incrementally, there's a connection made between these very disparate characters. I also liked the last half hour where we see Werner outside of the house and at German HQ or talking with fellow officers and the contrast of his own awakening to culture and French artistic expression with the dogmatic nature of Nazism. It's even a braze and courageously made movie ultimately for how it posits the French civilians like these two (not so much characters but apt props for the narrative) and Werner, who is fleshed out and conflicted and kind of a tragic figure. It's a film the more I think about it I like more, even as it's not as impressive as Melville's later crime films. For what he had to work with (clearly a low budget, mostly shot in the house), Melville gets a lot out of his imagery and slow-build up.