L’Armée des Ombres (Army of Shadows)

"It’s not negative – but it captures what a difficult, extremely dangerous and often hand-to-mouth thing the Resistance was, how survival was a matter of chance often. It’s a real-life Resistance film in a sense. He doesn’t glamorise it, he doesn’t downplay heroism, but it’s heroism on a human scale. It was one of the first movies where you can really feel and empathise with the main characters – it’s brilliantly acted. It also shows up the loyalties and the disloyalties and all the uncertain currents that were around in France, who could you trust, who couldn’t you trust, and so on. Yes, they make mistakes, they get things wrong. Towards the end, the different groups don’t know what they’re doing, and so on; it all gets confused. In that sense it’s a very real-life film. One forgets, talking about the Resistance, the extent to which things were often a matter of chance. My wife, for instance, who is Jewish, wouldn’t be here today if, when the police came around to get her and her mother, and the keys were in the door, the neighbour hadn’t said: ‘Oh, they’ve run away.’ And the police said: ‘Why are the keys here then?’ And she said: ‘Oh, you know these Jews, they always run away and forget something.’ And the police went away, and they escaped. I think my mother-in-law had run into the flat when she saw the police and left the keys in the door. My wife was a baby, but she says she remembers her mother stuffing her fist into her mouth, to say to her, don’t cry. The police came and knocked on the door and the neighbour saved them. But, on the other hand, my wife’s aunt was denounced by the concierge who made off with the silver. In the Jewish round-ups it was a question, the whole time, of which road you took. Another cousin of my wife’s who was a big Resistance figure down the Loire said you couldn’t think that much often. You took precautions, as much as you could, but so much was chance. It’s easy now for the British to look down on the French and say, ‘Oh, they collaborated – we would have kicked the Germans back into the sea.’ But life was not very simple. Melville is also one of the great directors of our time."