L'Armée du crime (2009)
Directed by Robert Guédiguian

Film Review

When you stop to consider the number of films that have been made about the Occupation and the Holocaust in recent years, you begin to wonder whether there will come a point when audiences will become inured, if not totally desensitised to the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany.  Robert Guédiguian's latest film, an epic WWII drama depicting the exploits of a resistance group composed mainly of young immigrants, proves the contrary.  Watch this film and you will easily convince yourself that there is no risk of mankind ever becoming blasé about the evil that Hitler and his henchmen inflicted on human civilisation barely two generations ago.

A big budget period drama is not the kind of film one would naturally associate with Robert Guédiguian.  This is a director who is considered the archetypal French auteur, renowned for his distinctive low-key comedy-dramas, such as Marius et Jeannette (1997), films that usually revolve around working class people coping with the vicissitudes of love and life in and around his native Marseilles.  Yet even within the area for which he is well-known, Guédiguian's films show a remarkable diversity, both in style and subject, and so perhaps we should not be so surprised that he should direct a film which, at first sight, appears to so atypical.  L'Armée du crime may be painted on a much larger canvas than we might expect of Guédiguian, it may be set in a past époque somewhat removed from his own experiences, yet it has the essential qualities that best define this director's cinema, particularly an engagement with leftwing politics and a deep-seated compassion for ordinary people who are confronted with extraordinary challenges.

Robert Guédiguian has made so many great films, films which differ in so many ways, that it is hard to compare their relative merits.  However, L'Armée du crime must surely rate as one of his greatest achievements.  Guédiguian's assured direction is complemented by some impressive design and exceptional performances to make this one of the most compelling and harrowing of wartime dramas.  Nothing can prepare you for the full visceral impact of the last thirty minutes of the film, in which the worst and best that humanity can produce are presented to us in an understated but highly effective denouement and postscript. 

If Robert Guédiguian's aim was to provide a lasting testament to the courage of the Manouchian group (whose members included boys as young as 15), then he can only have succeeded.  This is surely his most exquisitely crafted and humane drama to date, a film that will haunt you long after you have seen it.  No, the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis will never cease to shock us, just as the bravery of those who fought against such evil will always move and inspire us.  L'Armée du crime is a powerful statement of a simple and universal truth: there are some causes for which you have no choice but to fight, regardless of the consequences.

Film Synopsis

In Paris during the Nazi occupation, a labourer named Missak Manouchian leads a group of young Jewish immigrants, of various nationalities: Spanish, Rumanian, Hungarian, Polish, Italian and Armenian.  They are united in a single cause, to oppose the Nazis and liberate France, and they are prepared to lay down their lives to achieve this end.  The French police, working for the Nazis, redouble their efforts against this band of resistance fighters.  In February 1944, twenty-two men and one woman are condemned to death.  Their arrest and execution will be used as a propaganda coup, but France will not forget their sacrifice...