#266: Army of Shadows
Resistance, by any means necessary
This review was originally posted to Twitter on June 6, 2020.
Initial release: September 12, 1969
Director: Jean-Pierre Melville
The French Resistance, even today, has been mythologized into something almost unrecognizable, even in the Anglophone world. What happens when you make a movie where you take the gilding off and show the resistance as it really was? Well, for starters, you get the movie de facto banned in the US for forty years. May 1968 saw a lot of upheavals in France in response to the abuses and inadequacies of the Charles de Gaulle administration; Army of Shadows was seen as pro-de Gaulle propaganda. That didn’t bode well for it.
France at the time was the leader in arthouse cinema (to the point that the stereotype of “incomprensible froofroo postmodernist bullshit” films is that they are either from France or, if American, done in French for extra pretentiousness points.) American arthouse circles tended to follow what was in vogue in France; when the French art community condemned Army of Shadows, so too did the American art community sight unseen, keeping the film from a US release until a 2006 restoration.
But de Gaulle is mentioned only once in the film at the beginning; he otherwise may as well not exist. This is not a film about him, but about the people who fought for the freedom of France and its people — and the measures they took to ensure operational security. In some ways the film plays out like a mob movie; about a quarter of the way through the film’s two and a half hour runtime, several resistance members bring a traitor to a rented house for an execution, and argue over the best way to kill him. They can’t shoot him, because neighbors moved in next door overnight and the walls are paper thin; they can’t slit his throat because the house has no knives. Eventually they settle on strangling him, to the slight consternation of a new recruit.
There’s lots of little situations like this in the film; the resistance is small, not taken seriously by the allied militaries save for the minimum of technical support, and always at risk of being exposed when its members are captured and tortured by the Gestapo. So we’re treated to an oppressively tense film where every situation could go very badly, and even when they don’t, we’re not given the opportunity to take a breath. It’s a masterfully-paced film that manages to a thoroughly thrilling slow burn.
Music is used sparingly for most of the film, often only for moments of high emotional impact; this adds to the tension, because the absolute quiet of the film (save for the occasional background sound) makes the film feel more claustrophobic. The film does not end in a grand shootout; the closest thing to a climax of the film is a daring rescue of the main character by other resistance members that comes as a surprise and is over in less than a few minutes; the end of the film is quieter, and sadder.
It’s a shame that it took so long for the film to reach American shores; it’s a fantastic film that does not waste time waxing romantic about the resistance. There’s a lot of mythology and even propaganda surrounding World War 2; this film sought to dismantle some of it. It deserved to have succeeded.
