A nation shamed

Why does France keep making films that glorify the Resistance and gloss over the truth about collaboration? By Stuart Jeffries


* Stuart Jeffries
* The Guardian,
* Friday January 23 2004

The Sorrow and the Pity, one of the greatest films about the Nazi occupation of France, was originally commissioned by a government-run TV station. But when director Marcel Ophüls submitted the completed four-and-a-half-hour documentary in 1969, the station refused to screen it. Not because of its length, but because of its disturbing content. Network head Jean-Jacques de Bresson told a government committee that the film "destroys myths that the people of France still need".

The documentary painfully showed the extent of French collaboration with the Nazis. One interviewee told Ophüls about the infamous events of July 1942, when French police rounded up nearly 13,000 Parisian Jews - including 4,051 children - and jailed them in a cycle stadium. Five days later, these prisoners were loaded on to cattle trucks and transported to Drancy concentration camp and then to Auschwitz.

For De Bresson, France needed not truths but comforting myths. The film was not released until April 1971 (after the death of that self-proclaimed hero of the French Resistance, General de Gaulle) and then was only shown at a small left-bank arthouse. Only in 1981 was it screened on French TV.

The reception in France for The Sorrow and the Pity contrasts markedly with that accorded to a recent French wartime memoir, Michael Quint's Strange Gardens. This was a French literary triumph of 2000, hailed by Le Monde as "a jewel that warms the soul". In Britain, the book was less well received: critic Boyd Tonkin called it "an anodyne crowd-pleaser".

That memoir has now become an even more anodyne film, to be released in Britain next week. Jean Becker's picture tells of two wannabe Resistance fighters taken hostage by the Germans after blowing up a signal box. You can get a sense of Becker's soft focus on harsh wartime events from the scene in which a Nazi guard is distracted from his post at the signal box by a shot from a Frenchman's catapult. This is a feelgood movie, temperamentally a million miles not just from Ophüls, but from many more superb French films dealing with their country's uncomfortable history between 1939 and 45.

In Strange Gardens, the duo are thrown into a quarry with two other innocent men and told all four will be shot dead if no one in their town admits to blowing up the signal box. How can these bumbling friends avoid execution? Happily for them, the ageing signalman is on his death bed, and makes a bogus confession claiming responsiblity for the sabotage. He dies a hero; everyone else lives happily ever after.

The film's most poisonous suggestion is that even if postwar France seethed with secrets about what its people did during the war, those secrets were innocent ones: here the two bumblers keep quiet after the war to protect the lie that the signalman was a Resistance hero.

The movie's release is particularly exasperating given how many great but now neglected French films have been made dealing with their nation's wartime history. They are feelbad films - and so they should be. For example, Jean-Pierre Melville's superb Army of the Shadows (1969), a taut thriller shot in customary greys and metallic blues drawn from the director's own Resistance experiences.

There is no cosy cod philosophy here, but rather a typically emotionally cool analysis of a Resistance group in Marseille. At the end of the picture, one of the cadre, Simone Signoret, is captured by the Gestapo. They confront her with a Sophie's Choice-style dilemma: either betray all her Resistance friends to the Gestapo with fatal consequences, or her daughter will be sent to Poland to work in a military brothel.

The wonderfully chilly denouement has Signoret's Resistance friends shooting her dead on a Marseille street - to spare her having to make an impossible decision. The mutual glances before Signoret is killed tell everything you need to know about the desperate circumstances that Resistance fighters sometimes went through.

Truffaut, Tavernier and Malle also probed wartime dilemmas with honorable fearlessness. Truffaut's The Last Metro (1980) questioned the value of artistic endeavour during the war. This was not just a matter of Truffaut encouraging us to think about the compromises made by such French artists as Charles Trenet, "le fou chantant", who entertained Wehrmacht officers at the Folies and the Gaieté Parisienne. Rather, Truffaut's film encouraged us to reflect on the suggestion that by continuing to stage plays and concerts in Paris, French artists may have contributed to making occupied Paris seem normal to its citizens - and that to do so was perhaps morally contemptible.

There's a similarly trenchant but uncomfortable investigation in Bertrand Tavernier's recent Safe Conduct (2002), in which the director considers the French film-makers who continued to work during the occupation - and the extent of the accommodation these artists made to avoid offending their fascist rulers.

Louis Malle, too, was keen to explore almost unbearably difficult issues in two great films set in France during the war. In Au Revoir les Enfants (1987), Malle took an autobiographical story to reflect on the nature of shame. At a Catholic boarding school during the occupation, a gentile boy called Julien inadvertently betrays a Jewish schoolmate, who has taken on an assumed name. The film deals brilliantly with Julien's belated realisation that he has committed a tragic mistake, one that - quite properly - will haunt him forever.

Malle's earlier Lacombe Lucien (1974) also dealt upsettingly with a wartime moral issue - this time that of collaboration. In it, adolescent Lucien applies to join the Resistance, but he's too immature. (Melville's tough-minded Resistance fighters would have spotted the gung-ho boy as a fearful liability in a second.) So what is Lucien to do to escape his boring, small French town for some wartime adventures? The Gestapo is hiring, so he joins them, to become not just a collaborator, but a torturer. In the years before The Sorrow and the Pity was shown to mass audiences, Lacombe Lucien's unflinching look into one Frenchman's heart of darkness shocked France.

Certainly the sourest film about the French during the second world war was made during it - and by a Frenchman, Henri-Georges Clouzot, who was employed by a Nazi production company. Le Corbeau (1943) depictes a small town torn apart by poison-pen letters. In this town, a purported microcosm for France under occupation, everybody has a shameful secret - and a motive for denouncing their neighbours.

Le Corbeau has been both attacked as anti-French propaganda and praised as the authentic voice of French cinema, but what is certainly true is that it captured the foul dog-eat-dog French wartime mood of denunciation that swept the country. Unsurprisingly, it is hardly one of Clouzot's most popular films, particularly in France, where patriots have condemned it bitterly.

When The Sorrow and the Pity was embroiled in its late-1960s scandal, it too was denounced as unpatriotic. One critic declared that the film undermined France's attempts "to regain her rank" and that "any wallowing in shame, any prolonged andextensive purges aimed at weeding out all those who in any way had done wrong, would only have served the designs of those among France's allies who wanted to relegate her to a minor role in the postwar era".

Shameful words, no doubt, but they are suggestive of the role of myth-making and even lies in some parts of postwar French society. Such myth-making was dealt with brilliantly in Jacques Audiard's A Self-Made Hero (1996), released in France with the tagline: "Les vies les plus belles sont celles qu'on invente" (the best lives are those we invent). It tells the story of a young man, Albert, who finds out that his father wasn't the war hero he affected to be and that his mother was a collaborator. Albert convinces the French authorities that he fought in the Resistance and as a result is made an officer in the post-war occupying army in Germany. Wonderfully played by Matthieu Kassovitz, Audiard's hero is a man who has invented a past to obscure dangerous truths.

One might take Audiard's brilliant satire as providing an analogy about the extent to which the French exaggerated the role of the Resistance and swept the extent of collaboration under the carpet. The best French films dealing with wartime have all dragged these incovenient truths to where we can all see them. In this context, it's a terrible shame that Strange Gardens, even though based on a true incident, only serves to obscure those difficult matters all over again.

· Strange Gardens is at the French Institute, London SW7 (020-7073 1350), from next Friday, and goes on general release in April.