La Sentence (1959)
Directed by Jean Valère

Film Review

Jean Valère was by no means the only film director to get washed away in the tsunami of the French New Wave but he was one of the most undeserving casualties of the upheavals in French cinema in the late 1950s, early 1960s.  Had he begun making films a few years earlier than he did he might easily have earned his place in posterity.  As it is, he is now almost entirely forgotten, rarely honoured with more than a brief mention in any guide to French cinema.  Valère's potential is at once evident in his debut feature, La Sentence (a.k.a. The Verdict), a minimalist wartime drama that is as compelling as it is daring, for the film takes place in real time, involves just five characters - members of the French resistance awaiting a death sentence - and is confined (mostly) to one set.  The cruel irony is that the film was scripted by Marcel Moussy, who had only just co-authored Francois Truffaut's Les 400 coups (1959).

Shortly after the war, Valère made his entry into cinema by working as an assistant to a wide range of filmmakers, including such luminaries as Marcel Carné (La Marie du Port), Max Ophüls (Le Plaisir) and André Cayatte (Avant le déluge).  His first film, a documentary short titled Paris la nuit, won a Golden Bear at the 1956 Berlin International Film Festival.  After La Sentence, which received a special prize at the first Moscow Film Festival in 1959, Valère made six further films for cinema - notably Les Grandes Personnes (1961) and Le Gros Coup (1964) - and two for television.

Valère was well qualified to make this film as he had been, throughout the Occupation, active in the French Resistance.  What makes La Sentence so gripping is how vividly it conveys the feelings of the protagonists during their all too brief period of incarceration - a sickening sense of fear punctuated by brief moments of elation whenever a faint glimmer of hope presents itself.  Even when they give in to the inevitable and accept the fate that has been allotted them, on a bare stretch of Normandy beach, the fear of death clings to them like a poisonous stench.  Whilst paying tribute to the courage of the French Resistance, Valère and Moussy craft an astute and poignant character study showing how individuals cope with fear in different ways.

Even though Robert Hossein is credited with the idea for the film, the main inspiration seems to have been Georges Bernanos' 1949 play Dialogues des Carmélites (developed from a screenplay for an aborted film), with Carmelite nuns facing execution at the time of the French Revolution.  Hossein stars in the film alongside his (soon to be divorced) wife Marina Vlady, with another rising star Roger Hanin and accomplished character actor Lucien Raimbourg (famously the cousin of comic icon Bourvil).  The performances are hard to fault - Raimbourg's is astonishingly true to life and even Hossein (not the subtlest or most expressive of actors) manages to snatch our sympathies with his authentic portrayal of a young man facing up to imminent extinction.  More understated and therefore more difficult to fathom, Hanin and Vlady venture a more conventional kind of heroism, one that is ultimately exposed as a façade to mask and suppress the anxieties that lie beneath.  Whatever feelings are left unexpressed at the end of the drama are amply supplied by Mozart's Requiem, the perfect accompaniment to the film's desperately grim final images.

The fact that the drama takes place in real time, with almost all of the action confined to one location (a junk-filled cellar), accounts for the film's extraordinary immediacy.  The sequences that open and close the film are visually more spectacular, more cinematic, but the real drama, the guts of the film, takes place within the comfortless, bare-walled room where the five protagonists must prepare themselves for death.  In the aftermath of the Liberation, there was a slew of French films paying a respectful tribute to the heroism of the French Resistance - the best known being René Clément's La Bataille du rail (1946) - but few of these has anything like the impact, let alone humanity, of Jean Valère's remarkable first feature.

Film Synopsis

As the Allies begin their invasion of Northern France in the summer of 1944, four members of the French Resistance are arrested after an attempt to assassinate a German officer.  Two women and two men, they are imprisoned in the basement of a German command centre on the beach with another detainee and informed that they will be shot in one hour's time.  Through the barred windows, the prisoners see that the beach outside is deserted.  This encourages them to make a bid for freedom, but their attempt to tunnel their way out proves futile.  An air attack by the Allies gives them some cause for optimism, but this is just another false hope.  As the minutes tick away, they must sit and await the inevitable...