In Jean-Pierre Melville’s sublime Army of Shadows (L'armée des ombres, 1969) the men and women of the French Resistance were less like Freedom Fighters and more like gangsters. They were as cruel and ruthless with each other as they were with the Nazi occupier. Melville, a master of mood and suspense, saw the potential for corruption in every relationship, and relished the savage irony of his story; that winning back France means not only sacrificing lives but souls, too.
Apparently the title of this grim French war drama, based on a true story, about a group of émigrés who band together to fight with the resistance in occupied Paris in 1941 is something of a homage to Melville and his brilliant film. The movie’s name has an historical basis too; the Germans dubbed the group, made up of a motley crew of 'outsiders’ in French society, such as Jews, and communists, the 'army of crime’. This underground group of 'foreigners’, all fierce patriots is led by an earnest intellectual poet, Armenian Missak (Simon Abkarian). In the face of constant reprisals, where innocents are regularly shot, Missak’s crew harass the Germans with random killings and eventually graduate to military style attacks, ultimately winning the respect of their leaders in the French resistance.
But where Melville was lean and rigorous, director and co-scenarist here, Robert Guediguian offers a sprawling humanist saga of a dozen characters over several years; Army of Crime isn’t so much a thriller but a fresco of quasi-realist sub-plots breaking off into tangents of historical revisionism (it feels a bit like Ken Loach, but without the sparkle of urgency in his best work). The resisters here, unlike Melville’s inscrutable hard-cases, are hand on heart types, sentimental about the world and each other. If they’re not secretly cursing the Nazis, they’re continually pledging loyalty to each other. Still, Guediguian gives each member of his 'army’ a style and obsession of their own. The biggest threat to victory is not disloyalty, but their fierce individualism. Guediguian makes a lot of Missak’s existential crisis: his greatest dilemma is not the fear of capture, betrayal and torture; it’s that killing Germans is a threat to his highly cultivated sense of ethics. That's the crucial difference between Crime and Shadows. In Melville, war’s cruelty was an extensive of personality; in Army of Crime, Guediguian is a romantic. War is waged for an ideal and its tragedy lies in what we're prepared to surrender to its darkness.
A leftist, and the son of immigrant’s himself, Guedigiuan finds a lot of grim irony in this story. He slaps down the Gaullist myth of a unified resistance in hammer blows of plot. It’s a telling point here, for instance, that it’s Frenchman and not Gestapo who doggedly pursue Missak and his fellows. When the Germans order a round-up of Jews, it’s the French collaborators who do the dirty work without any help at all from the occupiers. Guediguian isn’t subtle about any of this either; he’s not above producing shots of wicked Nazis laughing at the cruel fate of Jews heading for the gas chambers of Auschwitz. At two hours, Army of Crime is heavy and lugubrious; what keeps it moving isn’t the fussy writing or the rather lifeless, bland point-n-shoot direction but the cast, especially Virginie Ledoyen who plays Mélinée, Missak’s loyal and dogged wife. The movie really comes alive whenever they’re on screen with an energy that makes the rest of the movie dull by comparison.
Still, Guediguian isn’t all po-faced and earnest. Army of Crime has a couple of fine action scenes and one wonderful, daringly attenuated piece of farce where, after a raid goes wrong, Missak and his comrades end up losing the safety pin from a grenade... Guediguian has his brave fighters framed against a cobble stone street at night, heads down, staggering like drunks trying to find a set of lost keys. It’s a witty bit of business and a relief from the severe sermon-like tone that saturates the rest of the film.
