Liberté (2010) - film review

Théodore is the mayor and vet of a small village in Nazi occupied France during the Second World War.  He lives with P’tit Claude, a nine-year-old boy who lost his parents at the start of the war.  The local schoolteacher, Mademoiselle Lundi, has acquainted herself with a party of gypsies who have recently arrived in the area.  The travellers hope to find work during the harvest, although the restrictions on free movement imposed by the Vichy government are threatening their way of life.  Staunch republicans, Mademoiselle Lundi and Théodore decide to give the gypsy children lessons whilst their parents are at work.  P’tit Claude develops a fascination for the colourful nomads and admires their freedom and insouciance.  But, as the Vichy police and the Gestapo make their presence felt, it becomes apparent that the gypsies’ cherished freedom is illusory...

Liberté is perhaps the one word in the French language which best characterises Tony Gatlif’s approach to cinema.  Whether it be his choice of subject, the way he tells a story, the way he uses the camera or the style in which his actors perform, there is a freedom and vitality to Gatlif’s films that sets him apart from all other filmmakers of his generation.  The word liberté also succinctly sums up the way of life of the people who are often portrayed in Gatlif’s films, the Romani, the nomads of Europe whose own freedom and way of life have for centuries been threatened by the prejudice and ignorance of others.  In Gatlif’s latest and most ambitious film to date, the word liberté has a bitterly ironic ring to it.

Here, Gatlif confronts one of the most horrific episodes in the history of the Romani people: their wholesale massacre during WWII as part of the Nazi racial purification programme.  No one knows for sure how many gypsies were killed by Hitler’s henchmen, but the figure is somewhere between a quarter and half a million, men, women and children.   This is one aspect of the Holocaust which has largely been overlooked and has rarely been depicted in cinema.   The only notable film to cover the subject prior to Gatlif is Alexander Ramati’s overly sentimental drama  And the Violins Stopped Playing (1988).

This is a subject that Tony Gatlif has long wanted to make a film about, but the enormity of the undertaking has until now prevented him from doing so.  Yet Gatlif is undeniably the director who is best equipped to deal with this subject.  As can be seen in his previous films -  Latcho Drom (1993), Gadjo dilo (1997), Swing (2002), and many others - he has a natural affinity with the Romani and a unique capacity for capturing on film the richness and colour of their way of life, as well as depicting their suffering and vulnerability.  No one is better suited to show us the Holocaust from the perspective of the Romani than Toni Gatlif - as this remarkable film bears out.

Liberté is neither a documentary nor a realist drama, but a stylised evocation of a period of French history in which the worst and best in human beings are brought into sharp relief.   On the one side, there are those who persecute the Romani and intend to see them perish in the death camps (the Gestapo, the French government, the Nazi collaborators and other assorted xenophobes).  On the other, there are right-minded individuals who, through their humanity and sense of justice, are driven to take a stand and support the victimised at the risk of their own lives.  The characters in this film are not the usual clichéd heroes and villains, but ordinary people who act according to the dictates of their conscience, plus a few very colourful gypsy folk who are shown to have far greater nobility than their persecutors.

Films about the Holocaust are notoriously problematic and are prone to sink in a deluge of pathos, as this year’s La Rafle (a film about the 1942 round up of Jews in Paris) amply demonstrated.  Gatlif’s Liberté is a rare example of a film that successfully evokes the horror and poignancy of the Holocaust without overplaying the emotion card.   It is enough that we feel the injustice and inhumanity of the Nazi’s Final Solution as it is visited on a peace-loving race.  We do not need to have our emotions played upon by over-dramatisation and manipulative mise-en-scène.  Gatlif’s understated approach, distinguished by its poetry and simplicity, is far more effective.  His film Liberté is a beguiling piece of humanist cinema that succeeds in filling a sorry gap in our collective memory of the Second World War.

© James Travers 2010

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