FILM REVIEWS – FILM OF THE WEEK – ARMY OF CRIME
by Dave Calhoun

Time Out
Oct 1 2009
UK

Just as director Rachid Bouchareb’s Algerian ancestry inspired him to
tell in his 2007 film ‘Days of Glory’ of the Maghrebian contribution to
the effort to recover France from the Nazis in 1944, so, presumably,
French filmmaker Robert Guediguian’s own background inspired this
latest, equally revisionist wartime drama which offers a thrilling
and informative new angle on the war in France.

Guediguian is best known for modern-day, Marseilles-set films such
as ‘Marius and Jeanette’ and ‘My Father is an Engineer’, but he is
half Armenian and was latterly involved with the French communists,
and this second of his historical films, after 2005’s ‘The Last
Mitterrand’, turns out to be just as personal as his more ‘local’
ones, despite the grand period canvas on which it unfolds.

It focuses on the guerilla efforts of the ‘Manouchian group’ – a
unit of Paris-based communists and immigrants who helped the armed
struggle against Nazi occupation. Heading this unit with some initial
reluctance was the Armenian poet Missak Manouchian (Simon Abkarian)
who directed a band of Jews, Hungarians, Poles and others to sabotage
Nazi rule. What this film describes is the radicalisation of Manouchian
and his comrades and the execution of their mission – a fatal mission,
as we know from the 22 names heard over the opening credits to the
refrain of ‘Mort pour la France’.

The title is a double nod – firstly, to the nickname given to
Manouchian and his colleagues after they were executed in 1944 and,
secondly, to Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1969 masterpiece ‘Army of Shadows’,
a film which dramatised with cold brilliance the rituals of the
French resistance. But while Melville suggested that all of France was
resisting or supportive of the resistance, Guediguian adopts a more
nuanced stance. By dramatising the efforts of the Francs-Tireurs,
the leftist resistance, he dispels the myth of a unified, Gaullist
resistance – an assumption that was first and most powerfully exploded
in cinema by Marcel Ophuls in his 1969 doc ‘The Sorrow and the Pity’.

Dramatically, though, Guediguian doesn’t live up to Melville,
who condensed the spirit of the resistance to a tense drama of few
personalities. Guediguian, meanwhile, calls on a rambling ensemble
to serve the many points he has to make about wartime France and
why people did – and did not – join the resistance, from stressing
Manouchian’s memories of war in Armenia and the motivations of
French Jew Marcel (Robinson Stevenin) after his father is deported,
to the idealistic communism of young Hungarian Thomas (Gregoire
Leprince-Ringuet) and the self-serving collaboration with the French
police of young Jew, Monique (Lola Naymark).

The breadth of Guediguian’s story is sometimes at the
expense of dramatic momentum, but nobody could accuse him of
over-simplification. His film is always fascinating and is a crucial,
stirring addition to the cinema about wartime France.