Laissez-passer (2002) - film review

In the 1940s, with France under Nazi occupation, the Germans continue to allow the French to make their own films, but under their supervision.  The newly founded company Continental Films, headed by Dr Grevan, comes to symbolise this unholy alliance between France’s creative talent and the Nazi overlord.  Some, such as the screenwriter Jean Aurenche, flatly refuse to work for the Germans, and openly speak out against the enemy.  Other, such as aspiring film director Jean Devaivre, see this as an opportunity to fulfil their creative ambitions whilst secretly supporting the resistance movement…

Laisser-passer, Bertrand Tavernier’s most ambitious film to date, offers a fascinating insight into the French film industry during its blackest period – at the time of the Nazi occupation between 1942 and 1944.   The film revolves around two comparatively minor players in the film industry at that time, Jean Aurenche and Jean Devaivre, and contrasts their very different attitudes to working for the Germans.  The film is morally ambiguous but raises some valid questions about how far one can legitimately collaborate with an enemy without sacrificing one’s cherished beliefs.

Although largely a compelling and thought-provoking work, with some excellent cinematography and creditable acting performances, Laisser-Passer suffers from a few deficiences which prevent it from being the great film it deserves to be.  From its bombastic opening, better suited to a crass Hollywood blockbuster of the Titanic variety, the film appears to wallow in its own sense of importance and grandeur.  At nearly three hours in length, the film feels uncomfortably long, there are too many incidental characters and the narrative seems to drift aimlessly in a few places.   If the film had been pared down and greater focus given to the two central characters, it would undoubtedly have had much greater impact.  And who, other than a serious film enthusiast or historian, would notice or be interested in all those passing references to 1940s French cinema?   Cinephiles will no doubt relish the references to such works as L’Assassinat du père Noël and Cécile est morte, but all this gratuitous name-dropping is more likely to alienate most of the film’s audience.  It does look as if its director is torn between making a comprehensive documentary and a serious film drama, without achieving either aim satisfactorily.

Another fault with Laisser-Passer is its not-very-subtle political bias, which suggests that Tavernier is only interested in telling one small part of a much more complex picture.  Given that Jean Aurenche worked as a screenwriter for Tavernier on his early films, the suspicion is that Tavernier may be perhaps giving too much weight to one man’s (probably unrepresentative) view of history.  The film also makes some bizarre comments on the French New Wave (hinting that the work of Truffaut and his cohorts would have been superfluous if French cinema had been allowed to follow its “natural” course).  Such controversial, one-sided commentary reinforces the impression that Tavernier is more concerned with being an agent provocateur than with painting an entirely accurate picture of history.

However, these quibbles aside, Laissez-passer is a well-made and largely entertaining film.  Once the philandering, annoyingly self-righteous Aurenche has been pushed into the background, the underplayed heroism of Jean Devaivre (magnificently portrayed by Jacques Gamblin) becomes the film’s focus, and the film starts to gather some kind of momentum and direction.  The sequence where Devaivre gets caught up in delivering stolen Nazi documents to the English is both suspenseful and funny – although its impact is cruelly diminished by the film’s rather flat ending.

© James Travers 2003

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