I avoid detailed synopses of films I’ve never seen. About Jean-Pierre Melville’s Army of Shadows I knew only this: it was a war film, about the French Resistance, depicted in images both intense and bleak.
This was still enough for me to build anticipation. I expected something alternately grim and thrilling, about men and women attempting to thwart the efforts of Nazi occupiers and Vichy collaborators without being captured, tortured, and forced to betray their own. And I wasn’t exactly wrong. Army of Shadows is about that. But while it has these elements in common with caper and escape films, on one hand, and more sympathy-driven human dramas on the other, what’s most striking about Army of Shadows is its nihilism. We finish it not with tears in our eyes for the sacrifice these men and women made, but shaking our heads for the contortions of spirit those terrible times forced them to make.
