Criminal acts from L'ARMÉE DE CRIME
November 2009
© Tim Cawkwell 2009
This film is exemplary of some of the worst features of ‘cinema of quality’, an ossifying tendency in French cinema, but not just the French. The situation cries out for a new New Wave, a new set of young Turks to ‘make it new’.
The director Robert Guédigiuian, whose father was Armenian, is no young Turk. I was disconcerted to see Occupied France in such bright colours – but then I thought of L’Armée des ombres (1969), Lacombe Lucien (1974), Le Dernier Metro (1980), Au Revoir les enfants (1987), Un héros très discret (1996), which were all in colour but at least they had the decency to mute their colours, to make some effort at suggesting the squalid drabness of life in Occupied France. In L’Armée de crime they all wear simple, fresh, clean and rather fetching clothes. Missak says he ‘feels dirty’, but although being in need of a shave he certainly hardly looked it.
Why does he feel dirty? Answer: because he signed a statement saying he is not a Communist. Since the choice was between death and signing a statement, this sounded quite sensible to me – after all he lived to fight another day for his beliefs – but it is presented as a great betrayal of himself and of others. Now, Melville’s L’Armée des ombres was in praise of the Gaullist resistance, so has Guédiguian, moved by indignation at that point of view, set out to make one in praise of the Communist resistance? Very possibly. In his story to be Communist is sufficient motivation – enough said: ‘He must be a good guy, he’s a Communist.’ This is a dark story, which has been made with not nearly enough darkness, like writing a tragic overture in music but eschewing the minor key. This comes about as a result of an indifference to the question of motive in the film: we want to know why people acted as they did, but apart from Missak we are hardly told. This is made worse by the fact that the film, at 140 minutes, is at least half an hour too long. If sequences had been shortened, if communication had been reduced to a gaze, a look, a glance, leaving the audience searching for understanding, for making connections, then not only might it have begun to generate pace, but motive could have been supplied by the spectator.
Mind you, there is a cardinal weakness in the construction: the film focuses on the story of several characters, but fails – fairly spectacularly in my view – to create pathways for them. You could cite Altman or Paul Thomas Anderson as directors who know how to handle lots of characters and stories, from whom Guédiguian could have profitably learnt. And an even better exemplar lies closer to hand: The Wire has lots of stories, and the makers of that kept all those balls in the air by constant intercutting. In L’Armée de crime, the balls keep falling on the floor where they have to be laboriously picked up again.
Besides character being elided so that motivation feels weak, time is elided as well so you don’t know where you are and Guédiguian does not know whether he is making a reverential historical film or something dramatic. To cap it all, the Erbärme dich from Bach’s St Matthew Passion – poor Bach – is used clunkingly, not once but three times: again reverence has got the better of aesthetic judgement.
It is a fair thing to honour this story of courage, but do it with ellipsis and finesse: against the cinema of excess, we need young Turks who will rediscover that less is more. In the end, you think ‘What an extraordinary story, what an extraordinary waste.’