Movies: L'Armée du Crime * * * *
(Club, IFI)
Friday October 02 2009
Although it took them 50 years to get around to it, the French finally began facing up to their decidedly dodgy war record about 15 years ago. Almost uniquely among the Nazi-occupied countries, they rounded up the Jews themselves to save the Germans the trouble, and the notorious round-up is at the heart of this fine drama from Robert Guediguian.
The writer/director has Armenian heritage, and L'Armée du Crime tells the true story of an Armenian communist who became a central figure in the Parisian resistance movement.
An exiled poet who fought against Franco in Spain, Missak Manouhian finds common cause with the Jews who are being rounded up by the Vichy police in 1944. A committed communist, he risks arrest, torture and the safety of his beautiful young wife Melinée (Virginie Ledoyen) by agreeing to lead a team of insurgents. These include a young Jewish man who's a champion swimmer with a penchant for shooting Nazis, a Jewish schoolboy with a flair for explosives, and a woman who operates as an intermediary. But as their operations become ever more ambitious, the chances of capture and all the horror that would involve increases.
Guediguian is too intelligent a director to allow a slavish adherence to the details of his true story to bog down his film: he treats the story like a thriller, and turns a complex narrative into a very entertaining film.
The performances are uniformally excellent, and Jean-Pierre Darroussin delivers a lovely turn as a lugubrious police detective whose moral ambivalence sums up the casual corruption of the Vichy regime.
- Paul Whitington
Irish Independent
