FILM – CLOSE UP – ROBERT GUEDIGUIAN
by Wally Hammond

Time Out
Oct 1 2009
UK

The French director of ‘Army of Crime’ (see film of the week, p79)
tells Wally Hammond why he ventured out of modern Marseilles to tell
the story of the resistance from a new angle

The French director Robert Guediguian, 55, was born to a German mother
and Armenian father in L’Estaque, the new port of Marseilles, and has
made most of his films there in the past three decades. His populist,
lively portraits of his multicultural neighbours – films such as
his 1997 breakthrough, the romantic comedy ‘Marius and Jeannette’
– put the new port on the filmic map. Latterly, however, Guediguian
has ventured further afield: to Paris, to make his superb political
portrait, ‘The Last Mitterand’ (2005), and to his father’s homeland
for ‘Journey to Armenia’ (2006).

His latest, ‘Army of Crime’, is another departure: a ‘classical’
historical drama set in occupied wartime Paris which revisits the world
of Jean-Pierre Melville’s ‘Army of Shadows’. But the difference is
that Guediguian celebrates the resistance fighters who were communists,
Jews or immigrants to France.

‘What I wanted to show in this film,’ Guediguian explains, ‘was the
faith that animated these young people and the life and light in
them. And, so, I decided to evoke some of the things that are well
known – for instance, the fights between Gaullists and communist
fighters – but not get bogged down in their details. I just wanted
to show the fighters’ commitment.’

Unsurprisingly, there’s a large cast and an international dimension
to the film’s dramatis personae – Jews, Hungarians, Romanians,
Italians, Armenians – which differentiates it from Melville’s seminal,
possibly over-shadowing movie. ‘I’ve said that instead of making
"Army of Shadows", I wanted to make "Army of Light", ‘ he laughs,
before admitting: ‘"Army of the Shadows" is a masterpiece. But it’s
a Gaullist film. It accepts the myth of a unanimous resistance. In
Melville’s film, everybody seems to resist and you don’t know why. I
wanted to show why people resisted – not everyone did.’

Those motives are most startlingly examined in the character of Missak
Manouchian, the pacificist Armenian poet played by Simon Akbarian,
whose complex attitude to organising lethal attacks on the Nazi
occupiers forms a template for the film’s moral position.

‘Manouchian is not quite a pacifist,’ the director objects. ‘He wants
to fight, but with words and ideas. For him, a victim of the Armenian
genocide, violence is unbearable. He symbolises that all these people
would never have turned to violence if not forced to.’

Less edifying are the actions of collaborationist police inspector
Pujol (Jean-Pierre Darroussin) – ‘the most repulsive person in the
film’ – whose Machiavellian acts of seduction and betrayal are as
shocking as they are sobering. ‘That sober tone was important. It’s
a true story and one I was afraid to touch, so I wanted to keep a
sensible distance from it. Making films, that’s always at stake –
to move people but at the same time to allow them to watch with a
critical mind.’

There were reports from Cannes that his film was sidelined, and
Guediguian is phlegmatic in confirming them. ‘In France, my films,
though successful, are perceived as not quite French. Perhaps it’s my
combination of political engagement, populism and formal interests
that excludes me from the mainstream. I feel closer to the younger
directors of the generation before me – people like Costa-Gavras and
Bertrand Tavernier – than to those of my age.’

Guediguian will return to L’Estaque for his next film, ‘a mad
melodrama’. ‘But, wherever I am,’ he says, ‘ I’m always making a
L’Estaque film!’

‘Army of Crime’ opens on Friday.