achenier A disappointing film in many ways. For instance,the persecution of the Jewish community is addressed, but in a way that does not makes us feel the true horror of it. It is presented as a political event that the characters in the film view more or less as a matter of fact.Similarly, little of the chilling terror that must have accompanied the maquis in their activities comes across. And some of the scenes are so unrealistic that they break whatever spell the film had succeeded in creating to that point. For instance, how likely is it that Resistant perpetrators of a successful attack on German troops would leisurely stand around their victims lying in the middle of the street, and chat. And how likely is it that one of the Résistance higher-up would emerge from the shadows and join them in their chat ? Surely, after the grenade explosion, the Germans, or the police, would have been swarming in immediately. The vast majority of native Frenchmen in this movie are portrayed as traitors and callous collaborators, while the Nazi barbarians are presented as gentlemen, assassinated at random, mostly for being at the wrong place at the wrong time. We must never forget that the population of France was the hostage of brutal thugs. To understand the conditions in that country, imagine if a village today was taken over by a gang of Hell's Angel who threaten everyone with death and torture if they don't do as they are told. Yes, of course villagers should refuse to obey and even go into the bikers' den and shoot everyone of them on sight. But is that really what we would all do?Surprisingly, this film was made in France by French people. It is another example of French self-flagellation.The film sins in another important way. The clear impression given is that the whole resistance movement was led and driven by immigrants with very little involvement of native French people. As if there was no Charles de Gaulle, no Jean Moulin, no hundred of thousands of other resistants, a great number of whom perished.Do not get me wrong. The intention behind this film is noble. Yes, of course, we must be informed of the essential, enormous and heroic contribution of immigrants to the Résistance efforts. This contribution needs to be acknowledged and honored.But this also needs to be done in a way that is fair to the other victims of German aggression. They are not to blame for what was done to them.

johnnyboyz Director Robert Guédiguian uses a large, wide canvas for the characters in The Army of Crime, a deep; nourishing and really affecting French film from 2009 documenting the true story of a group of resistance fighters in Occupied France during The Second World War. Here is a thriller which, despite having its events based on true stories and plights, never for one second feels fabricated nor preordained; allowing for an array of characters to be beautifully balanced in their struggles with the overall situation, those around them and themselves. The film is a testament to the high level of quality films that have been consistently churned out of France in recent years, deeply affecting character pieces.Without wanting to get into a petty discussion on whether The Army of Crime is better than 2009's other World War Two resistance-style thriller Inglourious Basterds, let it be known that as Tarantino's recent outing dealt with similar overall subject material; his characters were, certainly in the case of the heroine, running on a distinct character arc of revenge as those at the centre of all of it adopted roles equal to cartoon characters. The maiming and gratuity these people known as the Basterds were capable of was thrust unto us very early on as these gutsy; no-nonsense; Southern-drawl spouting sadists out to beat; kill; pillage and scalp as many Germans as they can find made itself apparent. Whilst it all sounds like a lot of fun, Army of Crime presents its leads, indeed some of whom are as young as the Basterds and as seemingly angry as the Basterds, but does so in a more natural and realistic light. Observing Robinson Stévenin's character named Marcel, here, as he transforms from a petulant youth whom has a girlfriend and whose hobbies include swimming into a creepy and unnerving individual, is more rewarding than having comic book creations already established to be of that ilk bully and push their way through specific obstacles.But Guédiguian does his best to refrain from giving us a character to obviously align ourselves with, indeed resisting the use of a specific protagonist. Instead, he spreads around the plight of these people pretty evenly: men; women; French-born individuals; Armenian immigrants; youngsters and elder people, there is no prejudice towards one 'type' of person being braver or more heroic or getting more of a study. For some, this technique will feel sporadic; making the film come across a weighty and quite heavy piece without an individual to truly latch onto resulting in some audiences being turned off. Heading in, I had no knowledge of the true story element to proceedings; but it would go a long way in describing the natural sense Guédiguian gets across. Not knowing how everything turned out and not knowing what became of most involved is, I think, a pleasure amongst many to be had out of The Army of Crime.The film's documenting of violence and how violence and the hatred of an occupying force in the Nazi soldiers can combine in propelling people to psychological places they might well have been unsure previously existed within themselves, is an interesting side-dish for The Army of Crime. Some characters slip into a brutal, hate-filled stupor easier than others; blasting their way through codes of morality in a rage of fury like nobody's business. For others, that transition is more difficult but not necessarily impossible. In the case study of young Frenchman Thomas Elek (Leprince-Ringuet), much is set up that his temperamental attitudes and short fuse exists and can rather easily get him into trouble. After being berated with an anti-Semitic remark by a fellow class-mate, he sits in the principal's office and is forced into hearing his highly attractive prospects for the future in front of him laid out, the light dim enough to have half his face covered by pitch darkness, the other half in brilliant light. The combination of the authoritarian individual speaking of the future and later roles the young man may very well adopt combined with that steely expression complete with use of lighting suggests a link to more than one possible future.But Thomas is not as much-a live wire as the aforementioned Marcel, a rag-tag; leather jacket sporting; rough and ready looking young man whom gets highly agitated early on at a tailors over seemingly nothing. He hates the Germans; loves his swimming and maintains an odd, semi-aggressive relationship with girlfriend Monique (Naymark). There seems to be an initial element of seemingly harmless shenanigans behind the first time Marcel engages in illegal activity of a resistance sort, when hundreds of red pages are dropped from a two storey building encouraging rebellious behaviour against the Germans. But this occurrence plays a more important role in highlighting Marcel's advances through the film, in the process taking everything far more seriously and when the snatching of his father by the German's occurs, moves his plight into a more personal realm.One individual, a middle aged man named Missak played by Simon Abkarian, is someone with prior experience of conflict between nations; he swears he will not kill anyone whilst involved in the resistance, and the pain on his face is agonising early on when he confesses to having to leave behind his fellow inmates at a local German built prison housing other arrested intellectuals, even if it meant saving his own life. The praise that he receives later on when a particular act of bravery, although essentially rendered heroism by those within the circles given the scenario, does further stoking to his morally torn core. Director Guédiguian even finds room to encompass that old 'two sides of the same coin' routine when, around a table (during which these exchanges usually happen), factions within the group demand different things out of the entire process; degrees of antagonism lead by a female character who wants her voice heard. The film is a rewarding exercise in both character study and slow burning drama.

max-vernon Communists come in all types, from harmless to ruthless: armchair theorist, industrial and peasant organiser, fighter against the class enemy, assassin. This film deals with the last two varieties and accords them some moral scruples. The Manouchian Group decline to blow up a brothel containing German soldiers and French girls; their poet-leader Missak Manouchian initially refuses the path of violence because his 'ethics' forbid him. Nazi-Vichy propaganda famously denied them any scruples by calling them an 'Army of Crime'.It may be that the film sanitises and romanticises both their violence and their contribution: using the attractive Virginie Ledoyen to play the role of Manouchian's wife certainly increases one's sympathy for the main protagonist. 'Flame and Citron' (2008) and 'Max Manus' (2008) deal with similar material and clearly do not romanticise violent resistance to the Nazis. Both these films leave one wondering if the anti-German actions depicted were truly worthwhile or simply futile and counterproductive.Army of Crime's aim is to rehabilitate these foreign Jews and Communists so they may join home-grown heroes in the Pantheon of The French Resistance. In that respect it hopes to accomplish what 'Paths of Glory' (2006) and 'A Love To Hide' (2005) successfully achieve for French Muslims and homosexuals. It is no wonder that it bombed at the box office, not that it is a bad film, but because its subject matter is so difficult and obscure and morally ambiguous for modern audiences facing 'terrorism' in a new guise.The film is good at explaining the motives of the (mainly) young men who decide to shoot and bomb occupying Germans. Jewish families rounded up by Vichy police for the Germans, Republican fighters from the Spanish Civil War, anti-fascist refugees from Hungary and Romania combine to produce individuals with an axe to grind. They have seen Fascism up close and find it brutal and nasty. Their vendetta is personal. The assassinations and bombings are depicted well, in particular the shortage of weapons and lack of expertise in their use.Less well depicted is the issue of German reprisals for such 'terrorism'. The film refers to imprisoned Communists being shot in retaliation but no mention is made of the many non-Communists – 'innocent civilians' - who paid the ultimate price for 'Communist terrorism'. Most early resistance groups disapproved of terrorism, seeing it as futile, dangerous and leading nowhere. Hitler's attack on Russia in June 1941 saw Stalin ordering the French Communist Party to organise an immediate 'Second Front' in order to take the pressure off the Russians.On 21st August 1941 the Communist Pierre Georges assassinated a German soldier at a Paris Metro station. Other killings soon followed. The Germans shot 50 randomly selected hostages in October. A vicious cycle of attack and reprisal had begun. The Vichy police had largely wiped out the Communist underground by the summer of 1942 and the film shows them dealing efficiently with Manouchian a year later. Active resistance was always a minority affair and informing was widespread.By 1943-4 Germany was losing the war and opinion was turning against Petain and in favour of more violent resistance. The Jewish deportations had begun and the film shows this as a prime motive in the Manouchian Affair. Manouchian refers to the Armenian genocide which killed his parents to explain his own empathy for his Jewish Communist comrades.Asking an off-duty German soldier for a light and then shooting him at point blank range may seem rather brutal. So was Vichy torture. So was the Allied bombing of women and children. So were the Nazi deportations to the death camps. The only important question is, 'Did these attacks on Germans do any good?' When asked about the impact of the French Resistance on German war production, Albert Speer famously replied, 'What French Resistance?' Vichy continued to send labourers, food and materials to Germany and to pay for the occupation. Quantifying the contribution of the French Resistance to Allied victory remains problematic and this film provides no answer.What the film does do is remind us how important the idea of Resistance was in forging post-war French identity. French Communists and their contribution were frozen out of the story as Gaullists and ex-Vichyists joined to create the Fourth French Republic which soon joined the anti-Communist NATO alliance. Anti-Nazi Germans, Spaniards, foreign Jews and Communists who fought alongside 'indigenous' Frenchmen in the 'Resistance' were largely excluded from this new national myth –making. This is what the film aims to redress.As well as settling personal scores with the Nazis, the Manouchian Group were fighting for a Communist future. Throughout the Cold War period the Communist Red Orchestra in Germany (the subject of 2 little-known films) and the Manouchian Group in France were seen as Stalin's agents. Little sympathy in the West.History was also being manipulated on the other side of Europe. How appropriate that the Polish film 'Katyn' should be released at the same time as 'Army of Crime.'! 15 months before ordering French Communists to wage war on occupying Germans, Stalin had decided to wipe out the Polish upper-class intelligentsia who did not fit in with his idea of a Communist future. Until 1989 Communist orthodoxy demanded that the 20,000 murdered Polish officers were victims of the Germans, not the Soviets.I wonder if Karl Marx ever envisaged that 'Das Kapital' might be used to deliver a bomb to a bookshop ? Communism is a great idea. Like all great ideas it can bring out the best and worst in people. However, viewed from my own comfortable life lived through the best half of the 20th Century, I find it difficult to judge these young men who fought a ruthless foe. Within the first 6 months of the occupation, the Germans had beaten up the prefect Jean Moulin and shot Jacques Bonsergent for simply raising his fist against them. Moral ambiguities make this a difficult, murky, subject for a film.

oOgiandujaOo_and_Eddy_Merckx Paris in the sunshine... through meshed windows. Several normal-looking men and women travelling in a grilled bus. A woman sees another woman wheeling a pram along a promenade, she wonders aloud whether the pram contains bombs. On a boating lake a man is scratching away on a sketch pad whilst his paramour drapes alluringly in the prow. He's not sketching her though, we cut to the pad and see that he's a pamphleteer. "Fair is foul and foul is fair" is the view we are given in this short space of time at the start of Army of Crime, Robert Guédiguian's vital new movie. Marcel Ophüls' 1969 documentary The Sorrow and the Pity is all anyone needs to see to comprehend the loathsome extent to which the government in France (uniquely) collaborated with murderous fascists. However folks are no longer keen on seeing four hour long black and white documentaries what with their absence of music video effects and popular music and such. So Guédiguian has revived the history, and not just for revival's sake, also to counter contemporary anti-immigrant prejudice. Whilst the naturalised French, in large proportion failed to resist the Nazis, many French immigrants on the other hand laid down their lives in the Communist resistance. By contrast, the low point of the entire collaboration was when a twentieth century French police force decided to resurrect the Carthaginian traditions of mass child sacrifice, and chose as their Tophet, the Velodrome d'Hiver. Without the help of a single Wehrmacht soldier, SS soldier, or Gestapo thug, the French police rounded up 13,000 Jewish souls including 4,000 children, who were then shipped off to Auschwitz. Against these existential lepers of the Gendarmerie stood Missak Manouchian and his band of fighters (the FTP-MOI), many of whom had already fought the tide of fascism in Spain.Manouchian is a very interesting character who perhaps received the most character development of all the fighters. He was an Armenian refugee, who survived the Armenian Genocide, which was perpetrated by the Ottoman Army. Out of the silence that followed his terrifying experiences grew his poetry, which was beautiful (based on the example we see in the film). He has to take two key compromises during the film. In order to escape from a camp of hostages, he has to sign a document declaring that he is not a communist. Initially he refuses to sign, but in order to live he eventually does. The second key compromise is when he agrees to kill even though he does not believe in killing, calling it "unethical". It is very difficult for the fighters, they are so full of life, they decide that they must be the enemies of the enemies of life.Please note that there is a scene of gruelling torture in this film, committed of course by the French police.It's one of those rare films that is actually edifying, where you come out with a will to live, a will to do right, and a will to speak out against racial intolerance. It is the polar opposite of the crass and odious Inlgorious Basterds, still playing at the cinema, and attracting over a hundred times more spectators.