'Army of Shadows' Takes a Hard Look at a Horrible and Marvelous Time

Jean-Pierre Melville's "Army of Shadows" opens with the startling image of German soldiers marching down the Champs-Élysées, framed by the Arc de Triomphe. The image was, this French director later admitted to an interviewer, a "crazy idea." Actors in German uniforms had not been permitted on the avenue since World War I, or so he claimed, and the shot was both costly and logistically complex. And yet, "it was a fantastic sight," Melville said with unmistakable satisfaction. "Wagnerian. Unfilmable." This former Resistance fighter had exacted a peculiar revenge on his complicit countrymen: he had invaded Paris himself, seizing it for his own vision.

Dark as pitch and utterly without compromise, "Army of Shadows" traces the harrowing feats of a small band of Resistance fighters operating during the occupation. Melville first read Joseph Kessel's slim novel of the same title in 1943, the year it was published, and for the next quarter-century nurtured a desire to turn it into a film. (Cinephiles will appreciate that Kessel also wrote the novel "Belle de Jour.") He finally did so in 1969.

By then he had already directed two other films about the war, along with some of the thrillers for which he is justly renowned, like "Bob le Flambeur." But he clearly wasn't finished with the fight of his life and not long after making "Army of Shadows" he exclaimed, "The war period was awful, horrible marvelous."

The same can be said of "Army of Shadows," which is bleak and beautiful by turns, that rare work of art that thrills the senses and the mind. Lino Ventura plays Philippe Gerbier, a Resistance fighter who has willingly surrendered his entire being to the cause. (Much as Melville surrendered to cinema.) The film opens with Gerbier's imprisonment in a concentration camp and, shortly thereafter, his escape from his captors. Exciting if implausible, the escape seems almost an afterthought to the scene immediately after in which Gerbier hides in a barbershop. Sitting in a chair with a face full of lather, his throat to a strange blade, the escapee seems cruelly vulnerable anew, the tension abating only after the barber puts down his razor and shows his true colors.

What makes the scene so memorable isn't only the austere beauty of Melville's mise en scène or the leaden silence that fills the room; it's the unexpected intimacy between the men. The actors say very little; as is often the case in a Melville film, they don't have to. Rather, they express everything you (and they) need to know through the geometry of their gazes, in the way Gerbier notices a Vichy sign and how the barber never seems to catch the other man's eye. Through the masculine ritual of a barbershop shave, one of the few public arenas in which men are permitted intimacy, the two recognize each other both as Frenchmen and as men. In this barbershop Gerbier is delivered from barbarism back into civilization.

Melville's world is a world of broad shoulders and heavy burdens, shaved and grizzled faces, the civilized and the savage. It is a world in which a man's hat is an emblem of his professionalism, part of the armor he dons for battle. When a Resistance member walks into a boîte in "Army of Shadows," and Melville shows us a row of Nazi caps neatly lined on a shelf, it's as if he were showing us a cache of weapons.

Later this same man will be whisked away by the enemy and lose his own hat in the confusion. The image of the hat lying in the street like an upturned turtle is unexpectedly poignant because we understand with fatal certitude that the head that wore it will soon be no more.

Women don't play much of a role in this world, though there are exceptions, including Melville's film "Léon Morin, Prêtre," about a priest and the women who, in wartime, cluster around him. This gender balance gave Melville a bad rap among some feminists and no doubt his more outrageous comments didn't help. He once said that the American ideal woman was "a female with a pair of buttocks in her brassiere," which is both funny and, given that he made this observation in the 1950's, also true. Yet to fixate on his arguable sexism is to ignore the women who do appear in his films, like the fierce Resistance fighter played by Simone Signoret in "Army of Shadows," and, crucially, to miss that the films are, at their core, studies in troubled masculinity.

There may be psychosexual explanations for why this is the case, but the war and France's shame were reason enough. Melville, a Jew, was serving in the military when France capitulated to Germany, and he subsequently joined several networks in the Resistance. Decades later, while discussing "Army of Shadows," he pointedly noted, "Don't forget that there are more people who didn't work for the Resistance than people who did." It's no wonder "Army of Shadows" feels like a cold rejoinder to the cherished romance of the French Resistance fighter, wearing a beret and a sneer, and holding back the Nazi tide that had already swept the country. Kessel writes: "Today it is nearly always death, death, death. But on our side we kill, kill, kill." That is Melville's war.

When "Army of Shadows" was originally released, a French critic wrote that "this Resistance epic was, in the end, a sublime thriller." Melville rejected the comparison, even if it is also entirely possible to see his sublime thrillers as epics of resistance. The great man died in 1973 at the unfair age of 55, collapsing into the arms of a male friend. He left behind one short film and 13 features, a few of which, including "Army of Shadows," are worthy of that overused superlative masterpiece.

This film, which was never released in America and will now be making its way across the country in limited release, has been immaculately restored and features new subtitles. You can get lost in the blackness of its heart and its shadows. You might never come back.

Army of Shadows Opens today in New York.

Directed by Jean-Pierre Melville; written (in French, with English subtitles) by Melville, based on the novel by Joseph Kessel; director of photography, Pierre Lhomme; edited by Françoise Bonnot; music by Éric de Marsan; art director, Théobald Meurisse; produced by Jacques Dorfmann; released by Rialto Pictures. In Manhattan at the Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, South Village. Running time: 140 minutes. This film is not rated.

WITH: Lino Ventura (Philippe Gerbier), Simone Signoret (Mathilde), Paul Meurisse (Luc Jardie), Jean-Pierre Cassel (François), Claude Mann (Le Masque) and Paul Crauchet (Félix).