Quarter To Three Movie Club - JAN 2018/Army of Shadows - Discussion/Spoilers Allowed!

Yay! I haven’t watched that in ages. And it will be our first Morricone soundtrack.

I feel like probably a lot of what I have to say about this film has already been covered much more eloquently than I could manage, but damn I love this film. With my first exposure to the film, I had gone in more or less blind, having picked up the Criterion blu-ray shortly after release pretty much because I was intrigued by the cover art. Right from the opening shot I was engrossed in a way that films rarely grab me as an adult, and it has maybe the most powerful gutpunch of an ending I’ve experienced. Even now, the music that plays over the credits following the final title card gets me to tear up a bit.

So, so, many wonderful, tense and horrifying scenes: the opening with the viewer trampled by the marching soldiers, Gerbier’s escape from the Gestapo headquarters, the subsequent visit to the barber, the clumsy and sickening execution of the young traitor, the failed rescue attempt (with the heartbreaking gift of the last cyanide capsule, the discussion of Mathilde’s fate and–man–that ending.

I don’t think this is the best film I’ve ever seen, but it’s the one I end up evangelizing the most.

Thank you for evangelizing it. I’d have never have known about it otherwise.

One question I had: the gentleman that they got into the car and were trying to kill, was he the same communist from the opening of the movie who ran the power plant’s maintenance and had planned to escape with Phillipe? I thought it was the same guy, but I realized afterward that the scene would work just as well if it was someone unrelated. It’s just that at the beginning of the movie, I didn’t realize they’d be introducing so many characters, so I thought for sure that this is the communist campmate.

Oh no, The communist was just some kid, while the guy they executed was one of their own, another resistant.

Ah okay. Interesting. I know it happened right after the barber scene, so I didn’t know if they were transitioning to a completely different plotline or continuing the one we’d been seeing up to that point. Plus I missed a little of the dialogue at the start of that scene since I didn’t catch the subtitles. That’s the disadvantage of being very rusty on my French.

Dounat (the guy they strangled) was definitely not Legrain (Alain Dekok, the communist from the camp), but he’s also not the guy in the hotel scene, which I think some are tacitly asserting? That was just some guy (possibly “Anonymous Patriot,” Michel Fretault).

Wow, that’s disappointing.

Why so? I mean, Philippe’s knowing sacrifice of him as a distraction might have been more “Hollywood poignant” if it had been Legrain, but his willingness to throw another probable resister into the meat grinder established him, I thought, as a very serious operator.

That whole scene was surprising, in a good way! Up to that point Philippe seems like an insouciant, but as soon as he stabs that guy you know he’s deep into it. It was very unexpected!

Gosh, what a film.

I’m just disoriented because the movie had even less through-line between the scenes than I thought. So the only connection between the first setting (the camp) and the second (Gustapo office and barber shop) was Phillipe. And the only connection between those and the third scene (killing the traitor) was Phillipe again. I just have to adjust to that idea. Suddenly the movie seems more like “Resistance: Greatest Hits”, rather than “The Story of Phillipe and his compatriots in the Resistance”.

Only by a little bit. But still.

Well, I think that’s not quite correct, insofar as the dialogue between Felix and Philippe in the car after Felix grabs Dounat off the street suggests it was Dounat who sold out Philippe and his radio operator (who presumably did not make it) in the first place.

It’s even more realistic because of it. In a cell-based structure, you know very few people. Because that is how it’s supposed to be; you compromise fewer operations if nabbed and tortured and you talk (you will; everyone does).

To add on to that, Jean-Francois died without knowing that his own brother was not only also a member of the resistance, but its leader.

That was a shocker, too. I wasn’t sure it was the same guy at first because after all Jean-Francois had just rowed him out to the sub, but I guess he had his scarf over his face? Or maybe it was just so dark he couldn’t see properly.

I loved that little bit of family involvement. When they revealed the identity of the boss on the submarine, it immediately made me wonder if that little room he built in his house wasn’t just for warmth but to be a sound-proof room where he could conduct Resistance business.

And not only didn’t he know, he also looked down on his brother a little (in a paternalistic way) for being a boring non-risk-taker. Ha!

Now I am torn. I don’t know if I want to do a film by an American filmmaker that deals with Algeria indirectly and is so influenced by this film and Melville’s style, it just calls to me to be nominated or a film about the Algerian War itself.

Well, nothing says you can’t nominate one next month and one the month after. Wasn’t this Army of Shadows’s third try at the title? By the way, if you are talking about The Battle of Algiers, I was planning to watch it anyway, so I would definitely vote for it.

I might have been. I might not have. Who knows?

Seriously, this film really has me in a particular kind of filmic mood. I am really glad I saw it again, @Rock8man and @anonymgeist

That scene was nerve-racking. I kept thinking “isn’t that guy some collaborationist, thrown there as bait”. Ten minutes in the movie, and I was already a paranoid shell broken by the local fictitious Nazi regime.