L'armée du crime

Sharing, from a safe cinema seat, the anguish of an occupied people gave us a view of how we might behave in such terrible circumstances. The villains are not the Germans but the French people themselves. The real horror is not in the big scenes of torture but the ordinariness of the concierge cheerfully denouncing people in her own building. The French are still living today with the guilt of all that and this film is one of the rare examples of a frank look at this from the inside. I called it a "worthy" film which carries the film-makers problem of telling a tough story but still needing to seduce an audience into the cinema. The Picture House had a very small audience when I saw it tonight.

Paris is under German occupation. The Germans invade the Soviet Union and start rounding up communists. Mélinée's husband Missak Manouchian is an Armenian writer who escaped the genocide. Soon, he's picked up the Nazis. She's working with the resistance. He leads them after he's released. Marcel Rayman is a Jew angered by the Nazi propaganda. After his father's arrest, he steals a gun and starts killing German soldiers.

This is a traditional movie about the French resistance. Virginie Ledoyen leads a big cast of characters. Fewer lead characters could have intensified each person's story. There are way too many side characters in the group. The movie needs to stay on the Manouchians and Marcel and only them. It's a little stop and go with the flow. It's well filmed but needs a bit more to differentiate from the standard retelling.

Liberté, égalité et fraternité. The motto of France is certainly not very apt to describe the time of Nazi occupation. The nationalistic French mainly capitulated to the Germans, and left the resistance to a bunch of immigrants - Italians, Armenians, Jews, Hungarians, Spaniards, etc.

This is the real Inglorious Basterds. The story of those who continually picked at the Germans and made their lives miserable. They don't go home in glory, but their names are on a role of honor for those who served to fight oppression everywhere.

An American poet, Missak Manouchian (Simon Abkarian), and his wife Mélinée (Virginie Ledoyen) lead the group.

Director Robert Guédiguian does an excellent job of capturing the period, and letting us get to know the actors before the action starts.

This is a beautiful film about an ugly era. With subtly beautiful photography and quietly nuanced acting, it captures the mood of occupied France. Parisians bicycled, canoed and made love in the summer sun while Wehrmacht soldiers strolled, marched and rubber necked. If you were a German soldier in 1940 or 41, Paris was the place to be. The film also has that wonderful European quality that Hollywood never has managed to match or even understand. The performances are outstanding, often conveying more with a nervous glance or a cautious gesture than a page of dialogue could achieve. The vintage French cars and buses are a treat in themselves as are the scenes in the Paris Metro with the vintage carriages. (I rode in these as late as the seventies. I believe they are all retired now.) But the real worth of the film is that it challenges the common notion that all Frenchmen fought the "boche." Indeed many welcomed them and supported Petain. A powerful, beautifully done movie but it's unlikely to turn up as in flight entertainment on Air France.

This film had several good points: It showed the tense but complacent life of Jews in Paris during the occupation. "He'll be eliminated." "You don't know that for sure." It showed the complicity of the French administration doing the Nazi's dirty deeds. But we've seen that before.

It gave pause to wonder whether these resistance fighters were actually achieving anything of significance or risking their lives to pop off a few Nazi soldiers for no great tactical advantage.

It offered the viewer titillating glimpses of two beautiful actresses, Virginie Ledoyen and Lola Naymark.

But on the whole, the movie was dull. The characters were flat. There was little development in the plot: rather, a series of adventures culminating in predictable misadventure. It dragged on from one scene to the next without engaging. Six out of ten.