Army of Shadows

Jean-Pierre Melville's ARMY OF SHADOWS is a brilliant, brilliant movie.

Released to failure in 1969, when it films about the French Resistance were decidedly not à la mode, ARMY OF SHADOWS now enjoys the full Criterion treatment, with a magnificently restored picture and crystal-clear sound. It's a tense, exciting, moving picture, and it captured my imagination from the first frame to the last.

The film begins at the Arc de Triomphe. It's just after dawn, and the street is quiet. Soon, we hear the sound of marching, then the music of a band. What kind of Frenchman gets up before sunrise to march in a band? No kind - only the Hun would do something as crazy as that. And then we realize that this is a Nazi band, the occupation is on, and things can't be good. From there, we meet Philippe Gerbier (Lino Ventura) a nondescript engineer who's being checked into a Vichy prison camp. He's just another middle-class guy, nothing special, but he becomes one of the hearts of this film, a character whose matter-of-fact, world-weary heroism packs more punch than that of a thousand action heroes.

It's important that we buy into this guy, because he's going to take us to some dark, dark places. ARMY OF SHADOWS is not a movie about romantically heroic Frenchmen clearing the way to victory, but fatalistic operators who kill with implacable horror and struggle to die with something approaching dignity. Moreso, it's about people living with the hovering spectre of betrayal, torture, and death, and ARMY OF SHADOWS winds us tightly in the tension of that existence and never lets us go. This is a film whose big action set-piece is basically three stonefaced people sitting in or standing around a truck, and it's a setpiece that had me on edge from beginning to end.

While this movie works strictly as a spy thriller, it's also a brilliant exploration of both leadership and human perception. Leadership, because its leaders aren't made of ribbons and external authority - they're made of quickness of wit, intensity of purpose, and ability to execute. It's fascinating to see how their power relationships develop, and how much their followers rely on them for their very lives. Perception, because it carefully explores how the human mind frames and parses reality, particularly in a scene I'll refer to as "The firing range," in which we see a character's recollection of the action as filtered through his perceptions at the moment of remembrance.

The more I think about this movie, the more I like it. ARMY OF SHADOWS is a must-see.