L'armée du crime

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.

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.

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.

Paris in the sunshine... through meshed windows. Several normal-looking men and women travelling in a grilled bus. A woman sees another woman wheeling a pram along a promenade, she wonders aloud whether the pram contains bombs. On a boating lake a man is scratching away on a sketch pad whilst his paramour drapes alluringly in the prow. He's not sketching her though, we cut to the pad and see that he's a pamphleteer. "Fair is foul and foul is fair" is the view we are given in this short space of time at the start of Army of Crime, Robert Guédiguian's vital new movie.

Marcel Ophüls' 1969 documentary The Sorrow and the Pity is all anyone needs to see to comprehend the loathsome extent to which the government in France (uniquely) collaborated with murderous fascists. However folks are no longer keen on seeing four hour long black and white documentaries what with their absence of music video effects and popular music and such. So Guédiguian has revived the history, and not just for revival's sake, also to counter contemporary anti-immigrant prejudice. Whilst the naturalised French, in large proportion failed to resist the Nazis, many French immigrants on the other hand laid down their lives in the Communist resistance. By contrast, the low point of the entire collaboration was when a twentieth century French police force decided to resurrect the Carthaginian traditions of mass child sacrifice, and chose as their Tophet, the Velodrome d'Hiver. Without the help of a single Wehrmacht soldier, SS soldier, or Gestapo thug, the French police rounded up 13,000 Jewish souls including 4,000 children, who were then shipped off to Auschwitz. Against these existential lepers of the Gendarmerie stood Missak Manouchian and his band of fighters (the FTP-MOI), many of whom had already fought the tide of fascism in Spain.

Manouchian is a very interesting character who perhaps received the most character development of all the fighters. He was an Armenian refugee, who survived the Armenian Genocide, which was perpetrated by the Ottoman Army. Out of the silence that followed his terrifying experiences grew his poetry, which was beautiful (based on the example we see in the film). He has to take two key compromises during the film. In order to escape from a camp of hostages, he has to sign a document declaring that he is not a communist. Initially he refuses to sign, but in order to live he eventually does. The second key compromise is when he agrees to kill even though he does not believe in killing, calling it "unethical". It is very difficult for the fighters, they are so full of life, they decide that they must be the enemies of the enemies of life.

Please note that there is a scene of gruelling torture in this film, committed of course by the French police.

It's one of those rare films that is actually edifying, where you come out with a will to live, a will to do right, and a will to speak out against racial intolerance. It is the polar opposite of the crass and odious Inlgorious Basterds, still playing at the cinema, and attracting over a hundred times more spectators.

I'm surprised at some of the comments here. Cliff Hanley I think you'll find that all the members of the gang were white so can't see where you got the idea that the leader had a 'multi-coloured' gang. From different national and religious groups, yes. Can't say I agree that his comments are anti-Semitic, David W - Hanley's comments about the Palestinians are simply irrelevant. I was struck by the coldness of both sides. What does come through is that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. At least the gang tried not to kill civilians, but that came from the members not the leaders. What Mr Timothy has against 'knobs', I do not know! 'Nazi knobs' 'Commie knobs' - how about door knobs? I thought that this was a very powerful film - with few redeeming characters. Under extreme circumstances people give up their ethics, but at what price? Betrayal, either innocent or knowing is one of the major themes of the arts (see Graham Greene's books).