Dir: Jean-Pierre Melville
This is not an action film – just the opposite, the Resistance seems to be characterised by the inability to act. They spend their time punishing each other for betrayals, escaping from prison, or rescuing those who have been caught. They achieve nothing: there are no grand plots to thwart the Nazis, no thrilling escapades or heroic deeds, A large part of the film details preparations for an arduous trip to London (outward by submarine and return by parachute drop), all for the sake of a pointless, ineffectual meeting. Despite their aesthete leader (beautifully played but rather unbelievable), there is a seedy paltriness about the Resistance, the whole set-up reeks of futility and mildewed overcoats that even lapses into absurdity: when our hero escapes from the Majestic Hotel, the Nazi’s notorious interrogation HQ in Paris – simply by running out – he runs down the dark street and into a brightly lit barbershop where he sits down for a shave. Some kind of joke? It’s difficult to tell because everything is so deadpan. The only happy faces we see in the film are in a London nightclub where British sailors are partying regardless of the bombs falling around them – a complete contrast to the gloomy scenes in France.
There are things here to appreciate, things rare in a war film: a forlorn mood, silences more eloquent than words, ordinary people testing themselves in extraordinary circumstances, and a crisp precision to every word, every scene. All that is easy to like, but the film still feels superficial – many propaganda B-movies made in wartime deliver more than this. I don’t think Melville has the intellect go deeper, he is simply a borrower. The downbeat tone here may well be borrowed from Sartre’s Roads To Freedom, and like those books, this also works best as a study of commitment, how the need for commitment increases in proportion to the hopelessness of the cause, just as faith is necessary for religion. It’s still a mystery to me why Melville’s over-sombre, facile, pedestrian, artificial, pulp-fiction view of the world is so highly rated. Over-earnestness smothers any hint of irony, and perhaps that is the essential element missing. Without irony hIs characters are never real, can never properly interact with their world in any sort of realistic way. The ultimate effect is of cardboard figures held on slender rods being moved about in front of a set.
Cinema Cahiers 