By Patrick Z. McGavin
Cannes Film Fest 2009 (Out of competition)–With the tough and ferocious “The Army of Crime,” Robert Guediguian brings life, depth and hard truths to a remarkable story.
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The feature is consecrated in blood, marked by ugly racial antagonism, horrifying ethnic and cultural genocide and the ugly collaboration of a country and culture that rebuked its own creed and revolutionary ideas.
It is difficult if not impossible to talk about contemporary life without acknowledging the deep social and cultural divisions and lasting emotional scars of World War II, the most calamitous, devastating and destructive six years in the history of the modern existence.
Cannes has several movies directly and indirectly probing those very repercussions haunted by questions of memory and regret, healing and atonement. The Marseille-based director Robert Guediguian adds his own signature concerns of people trapped by the vicious historical brutality of the war and its aftermath.
With the tough and ferocious “The Army of Crime,” Robert Guediguian works to bring life, depth and hard truths to a remarkable story. That he accomplishes it is one thing, but be aware, this is not the stuff of dreams or legends. It is consecrated in blood, marked by ugly racial antagonism, horrifying ethnic and cultural genocide and the ugly collaboration of a country and culture that rebuked its own creed and revolutionary ideas.
The movie tells the stunning story of the Manouchian Group, a progressive collection of émigré radicals, Jews, socialists, students and ethnic French who bravely formed an anti-Nazi resistance network that staged daring guerilla operations to subvert the occupying German forces in France from 1940-1944. The group’s 22 members, including one woman, were almost exclusively “foreign partisans,” Poles, Hungarians and Spaniards whose families fled their native land to escape racial hatred and political disenfranchisement for the political freedom implied by the highest French ideas of liberty, fraternity and equality.
The group took their name from the Armenian poet Missek Manouchian (Simon Abkarian). Guediguian structures his film like a Robert Altman fresco, using a sweeping, fluid visual style that introduces nearly 20 interlinked characters. The movie is shaped like a long flashback, opening with the harrowing accounts of the fate that befell the insurgents. Gilles Taurand wrote the script, based on a story by Serge Le Peron. Taurand previously wrote Andre Techine’s “Strayed,” another work examining the moral confusion of the Occupation.
After German blitzkrieg forces overran the French army in June 1940, the countries signed an armistice. The collaborationist government, popularly known as Vichy, used its extensive police forces to abet German secret service outfits in rounding up Jews and tracking down anarchists, communists and anti-Nazi movements.
The story is built around the astounding story of Manouchian’s political skills, organization brilliance and black market toughness to sabotage German military and war-making ability. Manouchian’s father died in the Turkish genocidal campaign at the Armenians in 1915. Most of the movie is set between the pivotal periods between February 1943 to February 1944. Named the military commander of the unit in March 1943, Manouchian recruits a series of fearless, tough youngsters like Thomas (Gregoire Leprince-Ringuel), an explosiveness authority and Marcel (Robinson Stevenin), a top athlete and killer, especially at close range, carry out their deadly assignments.
His rise to the top necessitates Manouchian alter his own worldview and embrace violent revolution as a necessary response to the Nazi presence. His early involvement in a paramilitary attack that leaves several police officers dead sets the movie’s difficult moral quarry, balancing personal conscience and responsibility against the daunting demands of the military action. His wife (Virginie Ledoyen), having moved their young daughter to the countryside, is part of the cell who provides a domestic cover for his own clandestine activities.
Under the disciplined and rigorous command of Manouchian, the group undertakes a series of bravura attacks against German targets that culminates in the death of SS general Julius Ritter.
The parallel story examines the increasingly tense response by the Vichy police department to break up the network, drawing on the investigative excellence of a steady, instinctive police inspector Pujol (Jean-Pierre Darroussin). The balance of the movie plays off the tension, a series of cat and mouse encounters, staged actions and reactions that pit the limber, unorthodox underground forces against the well-coordinated, ruthlessly efficient police force.
“The Army of Crime” is an intensely political work. Rachid Bouchareb’s “Indigenes” explored the role played by France’s African émigré community fought tenaciously for the French in World War II. “The Army of Crime” is an anti-myth. It puts the odious, venal conduct of the French authorities up for review. Using vivid and intense recreations, the movie shows how the local authorities used whatever means were necessary, including torture and killing, in order to penetrate the network and break it up.
This is a vital history told swiftly, organically and connected to larger themes of family history. Robert Guediguian has always been a regionalist in the best sense of the description. This is a work founded in anger and sorrow. It sheds a light on a story that needed to be told.
