L’Armée du crime (2009) - film review

In Paris during the Nazi occupation, a labourer named Missak Manouchian leads a group of young Jewish immigrants, of various nationalities: Spanish, Rumanian, Hungarian, Polish, Italian and Armenian.  They are united in a single cause, to oppose the Nazis and liberate France, and they are prepared to lay down their lives to achieve this end.  The French police, working for the Nazis, redouble their efforts against this band of resistance fighters.  In February 1944, twenty-two men and one woman are condemned to death.  Their arrest and execution will be used as a propaganda coup, but France will not forget their sacrifice...

When you stop to consider the number of films that have been made about the Occupation and the Holocaust in recent years, you begin to wonder whether there will come a point when audiences will become inured, if not totally desensitised to the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany.  Robert Guédiguian’s latest film, an epic WWII drama depicting the exploits of a resistance group composed mainly of young immigrants, proves the contrary.  Watch this film and you will easily convince yourself that there is no risk of mankind ever becoming blasé about the evil that Hitler and his henchmen inflicted on human civilisation barely two generations ago.

A big budget period drama is not the kind of film one would naturally associate with Robert Guédiguian.  This is a director who is considered the archetypal French auteur, renowned for his distinctive low-key comedy-dramas, such as Marius et Jeannette (1997), films that usually revolve around working class people coping with the vicissitudes of love and life in and around his native Marseilles.  Yet even within the area for which he is well-known, Guédiguian’s films show a remarkable diversity, both in style and subject, and so perhaps we should not be so surprised that he should direct a film which, at first sight, appears to so atypical.  L’Armée du crime may be painted on a much larger canvas than we might expect of Guédiguian, it may be set in a past époque somewhat removed from his own experiences, yet it has the essential qualities that best define this director’s cinema, particularly an engagement with leftwing politics and a deep-seated compassion for ordinary people who are confronted with extraordinary challenges.

Robert Guédiguian has made so many great films, films which differ in so many ways, that it is hard to compare their relative merits.  However, L’Armée du crime must surely rate as one of his greatest achievements.  Guédiguian’s assured direction is complemented by some impressive design and exceptional performances to make this one of the most compelling and harrowing of wartime dramas.  Nothing can prepare you for the full visceral impact of the last thirty minutes of the film, in which the worst and best that humanity can produce are presented to us in an understated but highly effective denouement and postscript. 

If Robert Guédiguian’s aim was to provide a lasting testament to the courage of the Manouchian group (whose members included boys as young as 15), then he can only have succeeded.  This is surely his most exquisitely crafted and humane drama to date, a film that will haunt you long after you have seen it.  No, the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis will never cease to shock us, just as the bravery of those who fought against such evil will always move and inspire us.  L’Armée du crime is a powerful statement of a simple and universal truth: there are some causes for which you have no choice but to fight, regardless of the consequences.

© James Travers 2010


L’Armée du crime tells the story of a group of resistance fighters in Paris in the second world war, called the Manouchian group, after the name of one of the leaders.  At an early screening in Marseille, Robert Guediguian, the director, stated that this group, composed of young people of all nationalities and backgrounds, could still be an inspiration to us in 2009.

I found the film repetitive and sometimes boring.   However, there were some moments that were illuminating.   For instance, when Manouchian successfully kills a group of German soldiers with a hand grenade then, having fled the scene, returns to see the extent of the damage, the human cost of war.  We need to see more images of war like this.

The short scene showing the raids in which thousands of Jewish people were transported in Paris city buses to the Vélodrome d’Hiver, guarded only by armed French policemen, is well overdue.   I have always been surprised that this part of the Holocaust and the collaboration of some French authorities has been so little explored.  I did not appreciate the depiction of women;  two of the leading actresses sashayed around as though on a catwalk and gave little idea of the fear and anxiety that these characters endured.

Recommend it?  Yes, of course.   We still need the opportunity to honour brave people and to ask ourselves questions about our own attitudes to society in times of crisis.  Seventy years later, my French family is still affected by these events; I am proud of my father, uncle and grandparents and the struggle they lived through in fighting Nazi-ism.

© Micheline Lobjois-Sullivan (Londres) 2009

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