László Nemes made his Cannes debut 11 years ago with the terrifying, Oscar-winning Holocaust drama Son of Saul, and followed that up with Sunset, his elegant, mysterious drama of pre-first world war Budapest. His next film, Orphan, released in the UK last week, was a comparably enigmatic film set in post-second world war Hungary. But his new film in the Cannes competition is a basically pretty conventionally acted, conventionally directed, conventionally conceived wartime movie shot in the sepia-subdued colours of an old photograph, all about French resistance heroism and French resistance leader Jean Moulin, who went down in history for refusing to talk under torture.
The overall effect isn’t really like Jean-Pierre Melville’s film Army of Shadows; maybe closer to the 70s BBC TV show Secret Army. Nemes’s final scene is even rather sentimentally stirring, though the director then tries to cancel this sugary moment with a final premonition of the death camps. At all events, he undoubtedly brings impeccable craftsmanship, and the performances and production design are strong.
Gilles Lellouche plays Moulin, who is parachuted into France from London in 1943 to effectively begin the task of uniting the resistance’s quarrelling factions under De Gaulle’s exiled leadership, while refusing – with much worldly melancholy – the amorous advances of his civilian liaison, the fictionalised Comtesse de Forez (Louise Bourgoin). But before any actual anti-German resistance activity can take place, Moulin is snitched on and finds himself under arrest at Gestapo headquarters, facing the horrendous psychopath and “Butcher of Lyon” Klaus Barbie (a lip-smacking performance from the tempestuous German actor Lars Eidinger), who has ways of making Moulin talk. Or so he thinks.
Eidinger is arguably the only possible star-casting for this gruesome role, but his theatrical portrayal is sometimes a little too close to the sinuous malevolence of Hannibal Lecter. There is undoubted fascination in Barbie’s initial conversation with Moulin while he is sizing him up, amused and even impressed by Moulin’s sangfroid, allowing his prisoner to think he does not yet definitely believe him to be in the resistance, and is perhaps taken in by his fake identity of “Jacques Martel”. With a chilling sneer, Barbie tests Moulin’s claim to be an interior decorator by asking him how he would redesign the Gestapo office.
Then his torture becomes more cruel, forcing Moulin to dance with the Comtesse in his office, then unspeakably brutal, with mock executions, beatings and electric shocks. And there is pure evil as he gloatingly recalls the grotesque slaughter of infants in occupied Belarus. But Moulin shows his own ruthlessness, refusing to spare his captured comrades who had been promised clemency if only their leader would talk.
The outcome of his battle of wills with Moulin results in a bizarre temper-tantrum from the petulant Barbie; again, perhaps unsubtle stuff from Eidinger, and from Nemes himself. Undoubtedly, this is watchable, approachable, well-made mainstream drama, but Cannes audiences might have expected something else or something more.