Directed by Robert Guediguian.
In French and German with English subtitles. Colour, 139 minutes
Three things stand out in Robert Guediguian’s examination of an important pocket of the Resistance to the Nazi occupation of France: one is the sabotage of a myth popularized by Jean-Pierre Melville in his 1969 film masterpiece Army of Shadows; the second is the long-absent recognition of an Armenian war hero, whose tragic fate led Andre Breton to write his poem “L’Affiche Rouge” ; and the third is the director’s apparent interest in the nefarious role of the French police rather than in Nazi tyranny. Melville’s film is recognized in a textual use of his title, while the little-known Turkish-born Armenian hero, poet Missak Manouchian, is finally brought to wide-screen glory as a melancholy pacifist, haunted by the trauma of his people’s genocide in the earlier world war, who turns into an underground avenging hero against a foe bent on worldwide domination. Guediguian’s film shows how Manouchian’s group of communist Jews and anti-fascist immigrants from Italy, Romania, Hungary, Spain, and Armenia is branded criminals on posters, tortured, and executed for their cause, Manouchian’s story is supposed to be the radical center of the film, even to the point of becoming a fully rounded portrait of a reflective man with a beautiful, adoring French wife. However, Guediguian’s celluloid canvas stretches beyond him to encompass such characters as the young firebrands Marcel Rayman (a Jew of Polish origin and a swimming champion) and Thomas Elek, a brilliant Hungarian student of physics; Inspector Mithelin (secretly sympathetic to the Resistance); Inspector Pujol (who entraps Marcel by a devious exploitation of the young man’s lover); and Boczov (who survived Franco in Spain). The value of the film is in the intimacy it allows of the firebrands and their private lives. However, though the cast, led by the solemnly dignified, sensitive, and poetic Manouchian of Armenian actor Simon Abkarian (the Arshile Gorky in Atom Egoyan’s Ararat), gives fine performances all around, the array of characters dissipates the dramatic tension at times, though each scene is interesting in itself.
The script by Gilles Taurand and Serge Le Peron allows smaller moments an important place in the story without seeming to be needlessly fussy, but it also delves into the activities of the French police in the figures of a lonely inspector and a villainous middleman. The film is just as likely to catch two young lovers at play or two young patriots as champions in sport or in rhetoric as it is to show its underground heroes in times of quiet desperation or in acute physical pain, and it is always interesting as texture and as the ambience of a quiet but significant passion for life. But the cost of this wide net is to the catch itself: the terrorist acts sometimes seem as small as the tension that is dissipated in the widened focus. Perhaps there is a deliberate irony in this: Robert Guediguian intends no facile sentimentality, no amplified volume for the heroics. So while he loses in superficial excitement, he gains in semi-documentary truth.
However, because it is only a semi-documentary, The Army of Crime cannot match the depth and power of Marcel Ophul’s two-part documentary The Sorrow and the Pity about the French Resistance and the collaboration of the Vichy government with the Nazis. Guediguian’s film can only partially expose some of the reasons for this collaboration: anti-Semitism, fear of Bolshevism, and the desire for power. It somehow fails to generate an intellectual excitement of its own ideas, mainly because it does not convey the sense of an entire nation cowed and compromised by events. Sometimes gripping, sometimes horrifying, The Army of Crime is rarely over-powering or inspiring—in part because of its casualness, in part because of its lack of intellectual depth.
* I inadvertently omitted mention of the excellent eclectic score that uses
music specific to each ethnic group in the film.
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