Ion Martea
posted 13 March 2006

'La résistance française' has so often been glorified in films, most notably in Casablanca, that references to it, even in controversial films such as The Battle of Algiers, still make the viewer somewhat loyal to the iconography of the cause. As filmgoers are seldom great historians, despite claiming otherwise, a film about 'La résistance' does raise expectations of the struggle between the holy liberators and the evil Nazis. In 1969, Jean-Pierre Melville made a film that dispels all illusions, presenting a struggle that defaces the movement with truth and poignancy.

Army in the Shadows looks fresh today because it chooses to regard the resistance not as a movement, but as an army made up of individuals. War films are tricky precisely because once the narrative takes sides, they risk to appeal to spectators coming only from that ideology, and may even alienate some of them on trivial issues. Politics is a dirty business in art, and debates over policy can hardly help art express itself. Great war films do not deal with politics, but with characters. These films will eventually take sides, but at least we understand the bias because we are given the chance to understand the policy makers. That is why Downfall, Das Boot, or Apocalypse Now, despite dealing with characters we were taught to dislike, are more meaningful than the more likeable films such as Black Hawk Down, Saving Private Ryan, and particularly Pearl Harbor.

Melville knows that it is not de Gaulle, but the characters in Joseph Kessel's novel on which the film is based that would ring true to whoever has been through war. These individuals are not great men of history, but resigned veterans or names on crosses above empty graves. They did not manage to become heroes, to make serious changes to the course of war, but had only one duty: to keep the cause alive whatever it took. And 'whatever it takes' would usually mean four things: hide from the Gestapo, if found run from the Gestapo, if captured suffer the tortures of the Gestapo, and if saved by the other group members kill the traitor who leaked or may leak information to the Gestapo. Everything that is done is defined in relation to the all-powerfulness of the Gestapo and the impossibility of changing the course of history when one is just a member of a small underground army.

Army in the Shadows lacks all the clichés that define the war film. There are no great battles, there are no great deeds, there are no heroes we want to grieve for (except perhaps Mathilde (Simone Signoret), arguably the most fearsome tactician of them all). Each member of the group is eventually killed, either by the Nazis or by the other members of the group. Resistance overshadows their friendship. The desire for freedom towers above humanity, loyalty, love, making deceit and murder a mere necessity.

Melville does not seem interested in the battle between right and wrong; the film subsides quietly to the conflicts arising in his characters, and through them, in us. There is the real war. It almost echoes Lewis Milestone's All Quiet on the Western Front, which culminates in the simple realisation: 'War isn't the way it looks back here… We fight. We try not to be killed, but sometimes we are. That's all.' Yet it is not here where we find the real horror.

There are two key scenes that define the film. Both involve Philippe Gerbier (Lino Ventura), a leading figure of the movement, yet still a pawn to the real leader Luc Jardie (Paul Meurisse), and one of his loyal men, Claude Le Masque (Claude Mann, stealing most of the scenes he is in). After escaping the Gestapo for the first time, Gerbier and his men commit their first murder. The execution of the traitor Paul Dounat (Alain Libolt) is sloppy, because none of these resistance soldiers was trained for this task. Yet, with forceful hands and grieving minds, the job is done, quietly, almost masterfully. Mathilde, however, is the one to suffer most from what the war taught the Resistance. The murder is by now premeditated and carefully calculated.

France, like most European nations, has patriotism close to its heart. Breaking a national icon is thus a risky business. If Haneke can get away with his audacious Hidden, then Melville, a Resistance soldier himself, is not as fortunate. The film might have spoke true to the Resistance members, but audiences would not accept it as easily, definitely not in 1969, and it is still controversial nowadays. At least, the film cannot be faulted as a work of art. Melville had made a film that spoke true to himself, and in the resolution of Army in the Shadows we can almost see him (and us within him) identify with Brando's Kurtz, whispering in a quiet resigned voice: 'The horror... the horror...'.