Un héros très discret (1996)
Directed by Jacques Audiard

Film Review

Having made an impressive directing debut with Regarde les hommes tomber (1994), a road movie dressed up as a modern noir thriller, Jacques Audiard garnered further acclaim with his more ambitious follow-up, a slick war-time comedy that makes a subversive swipe or two at France's resistance record during WWII.  Based on Jean-François Deniau's 1989 novel of the same title, Un héros très discret presents a gently acerbic assault on the myth that General De Gaulle engineered after the war in an attempt to exorcise the shame of his country's capitulation to Nazi Germany and subsequent, far from honourable, period of occupation.  The central character Albert Dehousse symbolises a post-war France in search of a new identity, an inconsequential man of no particular talent who systematically sets out to reinvent himself, so that he can dine at the same table as the real heroes of the war.

Naturally, there were those who took offence at the film, even though the De Gaulle myth had by this time been pretty comprehensively debunked, partly by such high-profile documentaries as Marcel Ophüls' Le Chagrin et la pitié (1969), but generally it was well-received by the critics and audience alike and secured Audiard's reputation as one of the most promising young French filmmakers of his generation.  The film won the award for Best Screenplay at the 1996 Festival de Cannes and was nominated for six Césars in 1997.  The two charismatic lead actors of Audiard's first film, Mathieu Kassovitz and Jean-Louis Trintignant, are cast (somewhat bizarrely, as they have not the slightest resemblance) in the same role, playing the younger and older Dehousse respectively.  Shortly before the film was released, Kassovitz had rocketed to fame as a director through his gritty urban drama La Haine (1995), but Audiard gives him an opportunity to show that he is also an extremely fine actor, one who steals our affections as easily as a dewy-eyed puppy.  The supporting cast includes several prominent actors near the start of their careers who would soon become very familiar faces in French cinema: Anouk Grinberg, Sandrine Kiberlain, Albert Dupontel, François Berléand and Bruno Putzulu.

By inter-cutting the main drama, set in the grimly austere immediate aftermath of the Liberation (1944-45), with false documentary inserts, in which various people venture their own, contradictory impressions of Dehousse, Audiard reminds us how malleable history is, how easily the facts can be twisted for personal advantage.  The plethora of pro-resistance films that were released in France in the years following the Second World War, most notably René Clément's  La Bataille du rail (1946), played their part in redressing an inconvenient truth, bolstering the De Gaulle fabrication that France had been a nation of fiercely determined résistants.  History is never a static phenomenon; it constantly changes to reflect the mores and socio-political exigencies of the present time.  After the humiliations and deprivations of the Occupation, we can understand why France was so keen to 'big up' its role in the defeat of Fascism, but as Audiard's film shows, it is hard to sustain a lie indefinitely, and inevitably, no matter how hard you may resist, the truth will come out in the end.

Film Synopsis

In the 1930s, Albert Dehousse is an imaginative but solitary boy growing up in a village in Northern France.  His mother is devoted to him and clings to the memory of her husband, who died a hero's death in the First World War.  When the Second War comes, Albert is minded to follow in his father's footsteps, but is prevented from doing so by his mother's efforts and his innate cowardice.  After the Liberation, tired of his dull provincial life, he leaves his young wife and heads off alone for Paris, where he ekes out a meagre existence through a combination of petty scams and begging.  Seeing how well war veterans are treated, Albert hits on the idea of passing himself off as a member of the French Resistance...