World War II, France during the Nazi occupation. Resistance member Philippe Gerbier is arrested and sent to an internment camp, but manages to flee and hide in Marseille. His Resistance colleagues are Bison, Le Masque, Felix, Mathilde, and others. He travels to London to coordinate with the French government in exile, and then goes back to France. Felix is arrested by the Nazis and tortured in a prison, so Mathilde conjures up a plan in which she disguises herself as a nurse, equipped with an ambulance car, while Bison and Le Masque use forged papers to try to transport Felix away from prison, but the prison doctor rejects their request, declaring Felix too weak for transport. A Resistance member gives Felix a cyanide pill for suicide. Philippe is arrested, but manages to escape again. When Mathilde is arrested, and the Gestapo also knows she has a daughter whom they threaten to send to a brothel on the Eastern Front, the Resistance members agree to kill Mathilde by shooting her on the street.
Included in Roger Ebert’s list of Great Movies, “Army of Shadows” is a typically ascetic, cold, clinical and minimalist film by director Jean-Pierre Melville, who hereby delivered a monument to the French Resistance members during the Nazi dictatorship, the former of which he was himself a part of, and thus the story is imbued with authenticity, avoiding any kind of glamour. Melville is a realist: he is sympathetic towards the Resistance movement, but also objective enough to show how a change will not happen during their lifetime. All the six main characters of the movement in the story die before the end of World War II, and are doomed to a transitory-interim existence before any results of their efforts will bear fruit. The happiness of peace awaits only the generation after them. Congruent to this pessimistic mood, even the cinematography is bleak and dark, full of shadows, revealing a sad underground in which these members hide while undercover, but the movie is boring at times, grey and overlong.
Some of the tactics of the Resistance are not that impressive: in one sequence, Philippe arrives via train to a train station, but a whole row of Vichy officers are awaiting the passangers to inspect some of their luggage. Philippe thus spots a woman with two little kids and offers to help her by carrying one of the children, thereby “camouflaging” as a parent to walk pass the customs control. It is kind of a stretch that the Vichy officers would fail to inspect everyone, even parents, if they are suspecting Resistance members. One cool moment has Philippe rowing in a boat in the middle of the sea, until he reaches a British submarine, and then just exits from the boat onto the submarine. The best moment arrives when the Nazi soldiers are marching prisoners in a basement to a firing squad, when Melville untypically abandons realism and reveals Philippe’s narration, which includes this poetic line of thought: “It is impossible not to be afraid when you know you are going to die. I am just too stubborn, too much of an animal to believe it. But if I don't believe it to the end, to the very last split second, then I won't die.” The film is very good, yet it still lacks some true ingenuity or inspiration to be as great as the said sequence where the protagonist contemplates his mortality, life, fate and all the things between.
Grade:+++
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