The German occupation of France during the Second World War remains an open wound in the national memory. Above all, the collaboration of the Vichy regime, which aided and abetted the Germans. It was the French police who, as willing accomplices of the German occupying forces, rounded up French Jews in raids and deported them to Germany. Yet, the culture of national remembrance is focused upon the Résistance.
A central figure in this mythology was Jean Moulin, who had been sent to France on General de Gaulle’s orders to unite the various factions of the Résistance. He succeeded in establishing the National Council of the Résistance and in adopting a joint programme under de Gaulle’s leadership. On 21 June, he was arrested during a clandestine meeting in Caluire-et-Cuire, a suburb of Lyon. Tortured by Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie in Montluc Prison in Lyon, he fell into a coma and died from his injuries. In France, Jean Moulin is a national hero, with streets, schools and, in Lyon, a university named after him.
The Hungarian director László Nemes, who has explored the Holocaust and Nazism in several films, felt the need to retell the story of Jean Moulin. “I grew up in the 1980s in a totalitarian country where there was no freedom,” said László Nemes at the press conference. “By following Jean Moulin, we can recognise the price of freedom, which we in the West have sadly forgotten.” Moulin is portrayed by Gilles Lellouche with restraint and great intensity. Lars Eidinger, as Klaus Barbie, gets to let loose once again as a villainous Nazi following “Persian Lessons” (2020). For director Nemes, the two represent “the measure of good and the temptation of evil”. His intention was to focus on “the sacrifice Moulin made” and to immortalise his heroic story on film. Yet this story is well known; in France, every schoolchild can recount it.
The Gestapo agents and soldiers of the Feldgendarmerie behave exactly as one would expect from numerous films; they are constantly shouting „Los, los“ und „Schnell, schnell“. The role of the French police and the collaboration of the Vichy authorities are barely mentioned. Even less so are Moulin’s political ideas as a left-wing republican. Instead, we are confronted in far greater detail with scenes of torture, which, in their graphic nature, take on an uncomfortably voyeuristic undertone. One wonders: why does Nemes feel the need to illustrate once again everything we already know? International critics are hailing the film and its hero, “who says nothing and does nothing… but resists with the full force of his body and mind”. Among the French press, however, the reaction is more muted. Presumably because the story of Jean Moulin is well known in France and there have already been several films made about him.
In 'La troisième nuit' (When the Night Falls), which was screened in the Cannes Première section, Daniel Auteuil also tells a story of adaptation and resistance under the German occupation, albeit in a more subtle way. Auteuil himself plays the historical figure of the Catholic priest Alexandre Glasberg, who managed to save in 1942 in Lyon more than 100 Jewish children. When the German occupiers demand that the Jewish refugees, who are housed in a camp in Vénissieux, be deported to Germany, he works with the head of the Service social des étrangers (SSE), Gilbert Lésage (Antoine Reinartz), to exploit exceptions in the Préfecture's regulations in order to bring as many people as possible to safety. In the end, it is mainly children who are saved from deportation under dramatic circumstances.
Daniel Auteuil, a star of French cinema for many years, focuses on a single location and a specific moment in time: three days and nights before the refugees are transported first to Paris and then on to Germany. This narrowing of focus gives the film an intensity that ‘Moulin’ lacks. The tension arises from the confrontation with representatives of the police and the Préfecture, who must approve every exemption. In the end, it is a race against time that keeps the audience on the edge of their seats. There are no spectacular scenes of violence or torture; the story speaks for itself. By staying close to the characters and recounting what appears to be a minor episode, Daniel Auteuil evokes the full drama of the Occupation and the Resistance.