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Dashiell's Flicks: |
Armies Of Night
Army of Shadows is about a cell of the French underground resistance movement during the German occupation in World War II. The group’s leader is an aging, stolid, intellectual type named Gerbier, played by the veteran actor Lino Ventura. In the beginning he is sent to an internment camp, then manages to escape from an interrogation center. He rejoins the group, which includes characters played by Claude Mann and Jean-Pierre Cassel, and, in one of the film’s most unnerving scenes, they find and execute the man who had betrayed Gerbier to the Gestapo. The story then follows the group through various underground operations, sometimes with voice-overs expressing their thoughts. Eventually we meet Gerbier’s chief, played by the remarkable Paul Meurisse, and Simone Signoret shows up as a female member with nerves of steel. Although the storyline has its own taut logic, our attention is focused on the routines of working underground, with all the grim isolation and fear that this entails. We are made to sense a rigid, unspoken code that drives the characters—not a showy idealism, but a “this is the way it has to be” kind of feeling. The result is a unique, anti-dramatic mood of heaviness, like the crushing weight of circumstance that the secret fighters must have felt on their shoulders every day. The film deals with heroism, treachery, and the experience of being always poised on the edge of death, and yet the style is deliberately impersonal. This is an example of why Melville is such an interesting director—his films deliberately embody contradictions, and he makes the viewer wrestle with them.
This surveillance society is the premise for The Lives of Others, the feature debut of director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck that just won the Academy Award for best foreign language film. Ulrich Mühe plays a Stasi interrogator and surveillance expert called Gerd Wiesler, a rigid, impassive security agent who is completely dedicated to the state and the rooting out of anti-socialist enemies. In the early 1980s, his boss gives him a high-profile assignment: try to find some dirt on a prominent writer named Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch), who appears to be totally loyal to the government. Wiesler goes to work with his team, completely wiring Dreyman’s apartment with listening devices, tapping his phone, and even putting a microphone in the toilet. He then installs himself in an empty loft above the apartment and begins to listen.
Donnersmarck’s well-crafted script cleverly satirizes the authoritarian mindset which sees all independent thought as a threat to security. The movie has an element of sly, understated humor, but it’s also suspenseful and emotionally involving. The acting is fine, with an especially interesting performance by Mühe in the difficult role of a Stasi agent undergoing a change in consciousness.
©2007 Chris Dashiell |
The French director Jean-Pierre Melville, who loved American culture so much that he took the last name of the author of Moby-Dick, has had a recent surge in his reputation because of his film Army of Shadows, made in 1969 but never shown in America until now. 
It’s all based on a book by Joseph Kessel, who lived through many of the experiences himself. Melville was a resistance fighter as well, so the events and people are drawn from reality. His challenging style, however, lends unexpected qualities to the material. Here, just as in his more famous gangster films, he takes very unusual situations and presents them in such an abstract way as to make them appear ordinary. The underground saboteurs are stripped of any romanticism we might associate with the genre, and Melville shows them at work with the plodding sense of time, and the matter-of-fact absorption in the task at hand, that one would never see depicted in a conventional World War II film. 
If you wanted to study what kind of society government eavesdropping can lead to, you could choose no better subject than East Germany. The state security system there, or “Stasi” for short, went all out in its quest to create a file for every single resident. Anyone who even hinted at an independent thought, or knew someone who did, could be fairly certain that he or she was being watched. When the Berlin wall fell in 1989, the Stasi had dossiers on about six million out of a total of sixteen million East Germans.
The brilliant, young, and charismatic Dreyman has friends who have been blacklisted for dissent, but nothing can be pinned on him yet. His girlfriend Christa-Maria (Martina Gedeck) is the country’s leading actress. As Wiesler listens in to the writer’s stimulating parties and conversations, he gradually finds himself fascinated. The Stasi agent is a loner who has little contact with intellectual society. An element of vicarious pleasure enters into his surveillance, and against his will he starts to like Dreyman and especially Christa-Maria. When he discovers that the assignment had been instigated by a party bigwig who wants Christa-Maria for himself, Wiesler’s loyalties begin to shift.
This is one of the smarter political films you’re liable to see, with razor-sharp insight into the subtleties of oppression and resistance, but on another level it concerns wide-ranging issues of conscience, intelligence, and courage. If there’s a flaw, it’s in Donnersmarck’s desire to extend the film into an emotionally satisfying ending that resolves the ethical puzzle rather too neatly. But the point is one worth making, and the portrait of totalitarian thinking is both witty and welcome. Early in the film, the depraved party bigwig tells Dreyman that authors always think that people can change, but the truth is, people don’t change. The film turns out to hinge on that very question, and the answer involves some healthy self-examination.