Chris Knipp
06-16-2006, 12:04 AM
Jean-Pierre Melville: Army of Shadows
(1969; restoration, 2006)
Review by Chris Knipp
Brave losers
Jean-Pierre Melville has been selected as ripe for canonization. He's one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, critics are saying. Good, because I love his work. But please let’s not pretend it’s perfect. Everyone is saying this restored print of a film, rejected as Gaullist twaddle in France when released and previously unseen in the US, is his greatest masterpiece.
It’s fascinating to see how in Army of Shadows Melville applied his style to an experience he knew first hand -- the French resistance during the Nazi occupation. L’Armée des ombres is full of Melvillian effects. It oozes with a kind of heroic fatalism – gestural like Alain Delon’s doomed hipster anomie in Le Samouraï, and as nihilistic, but with selfless heroism replacing dry panache. However, tied to its period, approached rather late for one who lived it, and adhering perhaps a little too faithfully to a respected novel about the resistance, this film doesn't represent the rhythms, momentum, or focus of Melville’s best work. Ebert’s claim that it's the best foreign film of the year may be true, but if so, that's a sad fact.
Nonetheless the writers who are heralding this as the work of a master aren’t wrong. And at times it does achieve an epic quality, a deadpan existential nobility. It is, however, rather shaky getting started; episodic and disjointed in structure; and it takes a while before the viewer can finally fall in with its rhythms. Color wasn’t a good idea for anyone as noir as Melville and his other two late works, Le Cercle rouge and Un flic, look sickly. The color of this restored print is nice, but detail is blocked out completely in the darks and there are many penumbral scenes that would be much better had they been shot with the greater crispness of black and white. For Melville color seems to have seemed simply an unsatisfactory kind of black and white.
The opening image is much talked about. It's a short but chilling long shot of German soldiers marching in front of the Arc de Triumphe. We're told Melville had trouble getting permission to bypass restrictions against allowing Nazi symbols and uniforms on French streets. The point is made: this is the occupation, the time of Maréchal Pétain and the Vichy collaborationist government, of paranoia, guilt, betrayal, and pinched kitchens; a time of German voices and signage heard and seen everywhere; of everpresent oppression.
We begin with a man named Philippe Gerbier who's at the center of a small cadre of resistance leaders, though their chief, a writer on technical philosophy in peacetime and unknown to the rank and file, Luc Jardie (Paul Meurisse) emerges only later. Gerbier is played by the convincing, wonderfully stolid and stoical but not at all charismatic actor, Lino Ventura. The only cast member who exudes much warmth is Simone Signoret, who's central as Madame Mathilde but who appears less often on camera than various others. We see arrest, torture (or its aftereffects), imprisonment, execution by the resistance of its own traitors or compromised people and by the Nazis of captured resistance fighters. We see a lot of planning and discussion. What we don’t see and aren’t meant to see are suspenseful and dramatic and successful operations. This is a series of snafus and grim strokes of bad luck. This is about a gray war, a long battle of noble failures.
For a while we see only Gerbier – who’s being taken to a Nazi prison camp as we begin, a relatively benign one, whose austere comforts Gerbier greets with polite irony. He escapes after being taken off to Paris just when he was about to stage a potentially spectacular escape from the camp with a young communist who, like him, is an electrical engineer. We remember how Gerbier runs down the street and then, breathless, lets himself into a barber shop and requests a shave.
There are vivid scenes linked only be being parts of the collective effort. Gerbier and others nab a young man named Paul Dounat (Alain Libolt) who's become a traitor to the cause, and they execute him. We remember the way they have to struggle to find a way to do it. Neighbors have unexpectedly appeared next door to their safe house in the country so they can’t use a bullet, there is no suitable knife, and they’re left with strangulation with a towel.
In a central episode one of the leaders, Félix (Paul Crauchet) is captured and tortured by the Gestapo and Signoret’s character leads a trio who pretend to be a medic unit in a truck come to transfer Félix to a hospital. Imagine driving a truck into Gestapo headquarters: that would take a brass pair.
Gerbier is captured again and sent before a firing squad and this scene too is memorable because of the way the condemned men are released on a long gunnery field and told to run for it. It's sport. If they dodge the machine gun bullets successfully, they’ll be allowed to live to another day. Gerbier in voiceover wonders if he should run like a silly rabbit or just stand there and let the others run. But he runs, with surprising results.
The cadre -- with their chief ritually in the car with them to solemnify and sanction the act -- wind up -- in the final vivid sequence -- executing one of the bravest and must trusted of their members because that person has become compromised.
Another striking scene occurs when Gerbier is on a secret mission in London and watches young pretty nurses and soldiers jitterbug while nearby walls are shelled – people seem to be having more fun in England but are more in immediate danger of being blown up. An emergency back home forces Gerbier to leave his posh hotel and Harrod’s shopping and lobbying for help and be parachuted into France. He’s never done that, just as when the young traitor was strangled he’d never killed anybody. How does it all end? Not happily.
Film Forum, New York, June 2006.
(1969; restoration, 2006)
Review by Chris Knipp
Brave losers
Jean-Pierre Melville has been selected as ripe for canonization. He's one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, critics are saying. Good, because I love his work. But please let’s not pretend it’s perfect. Everyone is saying this restored print of a film, rejected as Gaullist twaddle in France when released and previously unseen in the US, is his greatest masterpiece.
It’s fascinating to see how in Army of Shadows Melville applied his style to an experience he knew first hand -- the French resistance during the Nazi occupation. L’Armée des ombres is full of Melvillian effects. It oozes with a kind of heroic fatalism – gestural like Alain Delon’s doomed hipster anomie in Le Samouraï, and as nihilistic, but with selfless heroism replacing dry panache. However, tied to its period, approached rather late for one who lived it, and adhering perhaps a little too faithfully to a respected novel about the resistance, this film doesn't represent the rhythms, momentum, or focus of Melville’s best work. Ebert’s claim that it's the best foreign film of the year may be true, but if so, that's a sad fact.
Nonetheless the writers who are heralding this as the work of a master aren’t wrong. And at times it does achieve an epic quality, a deadpan existential nobility. It is, however, rather shaky getting started; episodic and disjointed in structure; and it takes a while before the viewer can finally fall in with its rhythms. Color wasn’t a good idea for anyone as noir as Melville and his other two late works, Le Cercle rouge and Un flic, look sickly. The color of this restored print is nice, but detail is blocked out completely in the darks and there are many penumbral scenes that would be much better had they been shot with the greater crispness of black and white. For Melville color seems to have seemed simply an unsatisfactory kind of black and white.
The opening image is much talked about. It's a short but chilling long shot of German soldiers marching in front of the Arc de Triumphe. We're told Melville had trouble getting permission to bypass restrictions against allowing Nazi symbols and uniforms on French streets. The point is made: this is the occupation, the time of Maréchal Pétain and the Vichy collaborationist government, of paranoia, guilt, betrayal, and pinched kitchens; a time of German voices and signage heard and seen everywhere; of everpresent oppression.
We begin with a man named Philippe Gerbier who's at the center of a small cadre of resistance leaders, though their chief, a writer on technical philosophy in peacetime and unknown to the rank and file, Luc Jardie (Paul Meurisse) emerges only later. Gerbier is played by the convincing, wonderfully stolid and stoical but not at all charismatic actor, Lino Ventura. The only cast member who exudes much warmth is Simone Signoret, who's central as Madame Mathilde but who appears less often on camera than various others. We see arrest, torture (or its aftereffects), imprisonment, execution by the resistance of its own traitors or compromised people and by the Nazis of captured resistance fighters. We see a lot of planning and discussion. What we don’t see and aren’t meant to see are suspenseful and dramatic and successful operations. This is a series of snafus and grim strokes of bad luck. This is about a gray war, a long battle of noble failures.
For a while we see only Gerbier – who’s being taken to a Nazi prison camp as we begin, a relatively benign one, whose austere comforts Gerbier greets with polite irony. He escapes after being taken off to Paris just when he was about to stage a potentially spectacular escape from the camp with a young communist who, like him, is an electrical engineer. We remember how Gerbier runs down the street and then, breathless, lets himself into a barber shop and requests a shave.
There are vivid scenes linked only be being parts of the collective effort. Gerbier and others nab a young man named Paul Dounat (Alain Libolt) who's become a traitor to the cause, and they execute him. We remember the way they have to struggle to find a way to do it. Neighbors have unexpectedly appeared next door to their safe house in the country so they can’t use a bullet, there is no suitable knife, and they’re left with strangulation with a towel.
In a central episode one of the leaders, Félix (Paul Crauchet) is captured and tortured by the Gestapo and Signoret’s character leads a trio who pretend to be a medic unit in a truck come to transfer Félix to a hospital. Imagine driving a truck into Gestapo headquarters: that would take a brass pair.
Gerbier is captured again and sent before a firing squad and this scene too is memorable because of the way the condemned men are released on a long gunnery field and told to run for it. It's sport. If they dodge the machine gun bullets successfully, they’ll be allowed to live to another day. Gerbier in voiceover wonders if he should run like a silly rabbit or just stand there and let the others run. But he runs, with surprising results.
The cadre -- with their chief ritually in the car with them to solemnify and sanction the act -- wind up -- in the final vivid sequence -- executing one of the bravest and must trusted of their members because that person has become compromised.
Another striking scene occurs when Gerbier is on a secret mission in London and watches young pretty nurses and soldiers jitterbug while nearby walls are shelled – people seem to be having more fun in England but are more in immediate danger of being blown up. An emergency back home forces Gerbier to leave his posh hotel and Harrod’s shopping and lobbying for help and be parachuted into France. He’s never done that, just as when the young traitor was strangled he’d never killed anybody. How does it all end? Not happily.
Film Forum, New York, June 2006.