black out
by Douglas Messerli
Jean-Pierre
Melville (writer, based on a novel by Joseph Kessel, and director) L’armée des ombres (Army of Shadows) / 1969
Jean-Pierre
Melville’s intense drama of the French Resistance during the early years World
War II begins with the arrestment of Philippe Gerbier (Lina Ventura)—leader of
a network of Resistance workers in Marseille—a scene filled with ironies that
extend to the entire film after. Gerbier is seen by the Vichy government as
possibility a De Gaullist, but they, clearly, are unaware of his position, so
they put him in a relatively empty camp built originally for German prisoners.
Three of the prisoners with he must share quarters are ridiculous fools, men
arrested for various infractions that have little to do with commitment to the
French cause. The other two men are Communists, one a former teacher who is
dying and the other a young electrician who is devoted to his dying friend and
possibly his lover. When the friend dies, the young electrician, in charge of
the camp’s power plant, confesses to Gerbier his plan to escape. The two are
about to accomplish that escape, but Gerbier is again taken into custody for an
inquiry in Paris by the Nazi superiors. While waiting for the meeting, he and
another man make their escape, and Gerbier returns to his fellow workers.
The next scene reveals the sad series of
events that seems to dominate the underground activities. Three of Gerbier’s
men, Félix Lepercq (Paul Crauchet), Guuillaume Vermersch, a rotund being known
as Le Bison (Christian Barbier), and
Claude Ullmann, known as La Masque (Claude
Mann), have picked up another of their agents, Paul Dounat, and have been
ordered to execute him for having betrayed Gerbier. Having never killed before,
the three are flummoxed when they perceive, given that strangers have recently
moved next door to the apartment they have rented, that they cannot use their
guns to shoot Dounat; they have no silencers. Seeking a knife, they find no
such tool in the apartment, and they are forced to strangle the young man,
tears flowing down his eyes as they themselves suffer in horrified silence for
their actions.
With Lepercq’s recruitment of an old,
risk-loving former pilot friend, Jean-François Jardie (Jean-Pierre Cassel) and
his assignment to deliver up a transmitter to a housewife in the underground,
Mathilde (Simone Signoret), we now have met almost all of the secret Resistance
workers—except the very head of the organization, who turns out to be Jardie’s
philosopher brother, who lives in what appears to be a removed life in a Paris
mansion. Even the younger Jardie has no idea of his brother’s role.
In short, nobody in this film is who he
appears to be, not even, at moments, to their own knowledge of themselves.
Driven by a cause larger than themselves, they must act as pawns in a larger
game, jumping from planes without any lessons in parachuting, helping their own
kind to escape from impossible situations when they are arrested, and killing
members of their own network when it appears they might be likely to provide
information. Some of their undertakings, moreover, work at odds with the others
of their group.
When Lepercq is arrested and tortured in a
Gestapo prison, the younger Jardie pretends to resign and, sending an
incriminating letter about himself to the authorities, allows himself be also
be arrested and placed in a cell with Lepercq. Meanwhile Mathilde and others
have concocted a complex plot to save Lepercq, but they arrive too late, as he
too sick to survive travel, little knowing that now Jardie, who also has been
tortured, will soon be in the same position.
When Gerbier is again arrested, Mathilde
and others plot a remarkable escape, based on their knowledge that as he and others are about to
be shot, the SS officer’s play a sadistic game of forcing them to run like
scarred rabbits. Gerbier, who at first refuses to play along, is almost shot,
but when he finally does run, is miraculously saved.
Yet soon after Mathilde herself is
arrested, and, since the Nazi’s have taken in her daughter, she is no longer to
be trusted; Gerbier has no choice but to order Mathilde to be killed.
Indeed, by film’s end, we realize that within
another year of the occupation, all of these figures have died or committed
suicide.
Despite their heroic actions,
accordingly, they have little effect. The Maquis, by film’s end, seem to have
become more successful than the complex machinations of theses underground
warriors.
Although Melville filmed in color, the
hues of his scenes are so dark that we often perceive the images as being in
black and white. After each sequence, moreover, the camera goes black for what
appear to be longer and longer periods, as if to suggest that the characters
and the viewer are moving down a dark tunnel where any possible vision of
reality becomes increasingly unreliable.
At one moment, while visiting Britain in
order to request materials and funds, Gerbier is caught on the street during a
black out and, momentarily, seems unable to know where to turn. Through a small
crack of light, coming from a nearby window, he perceives there is action
within, and he enters to find that, despite the dangerous and deadened world
outside, the room is filled with young soldiers, sailors, and uniformed women
dancing as if nothing were wrong with the world. But it is, we quickly
perceive, a kind of joyless dance, a dance of death.
Bravery, cunning, love, and violence in Army of Shadows all seem meaningless,
since no action, no matter how committed to purpose (or how existentialist) the
actor might be, can save anyone’s life. Even if one might survive the horrible
world in which they are trapped and tortured, the survivors are hunted down and
destroyed by their kind.
The bleak view represented in this film
was apparently unperceived upon its original showing, when French critics took
it to task for glorifying Charles de Gaulle, a highly unpopular position given
the ravages of the Algerian War. And the film was not released in the U.S. for
nearly 40 years. Thank heaven for the restoration and re-release in 2006, as
well as its DVD appearance in the Criterion collection.
Los Angeles,
March 23, 2015
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