Part 3
The discussion of major French films containing Jewish faces continues. The theoretical discussions will be taken up soon.
François
Truffault’s The Last Metro came out in 1980 and deals with a director
forced into hiding in his own Theatre de Montparnasse in Paris during the
German occupation.[i]
Lucas Steiner, placed by Heiz Bennent, lives in the basement where he listens
to rehearsals of the plays being produced and passes on his directorial
comments through his wife to the nominal director. Madam Marion Steiner, played by Catherine
Deneuve visits him regularly and tries to keep his courage up, while the Nazi
menace closes in more and more on him and other Jews left in the Nazi-occupied
territory of northern France. Because of
his celebrity status and his strong Polish-Yiddish accent, Steiner cannot risk
staying in public view, and he and his wife have let it be known that he
escaped to either the Free (Vichy) Zone in the south or already entered
Spain. A few characters in the film wear
the infamous Yellow Star to indicate that they are Jews: a teenage girl
enamoured with the theatre who risks coming out after curfew to see the play at
the Steiner theatre, a fireman who stands in the wings in case of an emergency,
a young actor desperate for a job. None
of them look or sound different, which makes a mockery of the off-centre
remarks and radio comments about the official way to recognize a Yid. Lucas himself teases his wife by pretending
to put on a large rubber nose to disguise himself for a hoped-for dash into
free territory, before the news appears in the newspaper that the Germans have
invaded the south, thus cutting off that avenue of escape. He ridicules the “lies” in books he reads
which state that Jews seek to rob France of all her most beautiful women, as he
gives Marion an intimate knowing look.
In other words, there is a constant, subversive contrast between the
racist propaganda about the Jews, as well as older anti-Semitic stereotypes in
France, and the reality of members of the Mosaic faith long assimilated into
the nation and those more recent immigrants from Central and Eastern
Europe.
Yet even when the collaborator
Daxiat, the unctuous critic played by Walter Slezack, gives a bad review to the
play put on by the Montmartre Theatre, and particularly stigmatizes Madam
Steiner’s role as one pandering to a supposedly typical Jewish nihilism, the
film does not address the nature of Jewishness or Judaism, other than to argue
that Jews neither look, act or sound anything like the negative
stereotypes. Unmarked by the Star of
David, the male or female Jew is indistinguishable from the ordinary French
citizen or other European migrant. There
is no special outlook on life, no set of alternative moral or spiritual values,
and certainly no particularities of dress or food preferences—in fact, much is
made of the large ham Marion Steiner buys on the black market to keep her
husband well-fed in his cellar rooms under the theatre’s auditorium. Only once does Lucas use a Yiddish term,
referring to the others in the cast as goyim, a word Marion also uses to show
that this is part of their playful love language, not an inappropriate dropping
of the mask worn by an essentially unassimilable outsider. Rather than playing on conventional
typologies as a shorthand in character development during The Last Metro,
Truffault seems to go out of his way to deny their existence.[ii]
There is something similar that
happens in both Au revoir les enfants and Un secret, both of
which films again play with the need to hide the Jewish identity of their main
characters, and when those secret identities are made public to show that there
is nothing essentially or racially distinct to distinguish them from other ordinary
people around them. Whether it is a
class of children in a Catholic school who all look, sound and act alike,
except when the Nazi round-up begins and one of the religious teachers reveals
the hidden identity of the Jew or a young boy learning why his parents and
neighbours seem to be hiding something fundamental from him, some aspects of
his parents behaviour and attitudes only to discover that they were Jews forced
to suppress their former lives and ambitions in order to survive—and especially
that there was another child bearing his own name who disappeared during his
parents’ escape to the Vichy Zone in the south, as well as of his biological
mother.
Louis
Maille’s 1987 film Au revoir les enfants has a high degree of
autobiographical content, with the script mostly by the director himself.[iii]
It is reshaped sufficiently, however, to be a work of art and an intelligent
argument on the nature of childhood friendships. Not only do the young boys at the heart of
the picture, Jean Bonnet the Jew being hidden by the priests and working in the
kitchen and Julien Quentin the snobbish and arrogant Catholic pupil learn to
respect one another for aspects of their characters at first unseen by the
other and by themselves, but the role of the priests and servants in this
Catholic boarding school become deeper and more complex as the threat of the
occupying Nazis impinge on their lives.
It is more than a question of appearance and reality, with the Jewish
boy indistinguishable to the others until the climax of the film, but the
problematic question of difference altogether, whether of religion,
nationality, class, or social function. Julien
begins to note differences about the new boy, such as his failure to
participate in the Catholic services, his not eating certain foods, and his
secret prayers with candles. On the one
hand, then, these differences are private and seem to be non-essential to the
identity of the newcomer; on the other, they raise questions to the adult
spectator of the film who knows through his or her own knowledge of the period
forty years prior to the showing of this film and by awareness of the fact that
a nation can be constituted by people who do not all think, feel, speak, act or
believe alike. This awareness of
differences no longer abstract or theoretical but made vital by the experience
of the Holocaust through which, if not each individual in the audience has gone
through during the Second World War, then by belonging to a nation that has
been tested by that experience as a group and not only always come up to the
ideals which everyone would now like to believe he or she should attain.
Rita Kempley, writing for the Washington
Post, called Maille’s film “an epitaph to innocence.”[iv] But she shows how the director has shaped
the action to reveal more than the problematic nature of friendship in wartime
and under occupation. The two lead boys,
Julien and Jean, come closer to another even as they both misread the full evil
of the threats that close in on the school and on themselves. When the full extent of the danger does begin
to dawn—it breaks in with the taking away of the Jewish boy whose real name has
been suppressed as part of the disguise he must don to stay hidden in the
school—the helplessness of the friends to act, like that of the adults who run
the academy, overwhelms them. The
epitaph is not to friendship: it is an epitaph of friendship that
is ultimately powerless to resist evil. Another
contemporary reviewer, Thorn Hill, points out[v]that
inside the fictional moment of the history the movie purports to represent
neither the soldiers irritated by being brought out to the school before their
sinner was finished nor the boys who do not realize the implications of the
visit made by the Germans, there are more layers of tension presented. The full story is narrated by a voice-over,
not seen by the audience or by the schoolboys, so that even viewing the film in
1980 or afterwards creates a cognitive dissonance between the illusion and the
reality.
For the Gestapo agents who arrive at
the school, the matter of difference is biological and political, already
established if not at first recognizable: they are the secret police whose
existence, activity and purposes are anything but secret. The boys at the school, by virtue of their
age and hence lack of experience, seem to be innocents, that is, naïve, just as
they seem to be innocent of the crimes committed by them in the eyes of the
state—to be a Jew in France in 1944 already is a crime by Nazi law, to harbour
a Jew puts the school authorities and the boys who know or suspect the secret
of the teachers makes them accessories after the fact and hence equally guilty,
but there are other laws: there is the code of French honour based on loyalty
to the principles of humanity enshrined in the themes of the Revolution of
1789, the basic decency of friendship and fellow-humanity, the morality of
Christian love, all of which make informers criminals to the point of treason
and passive acceptance of the occupiers’ authority a crime as well.
NOTES
[i] Vincent Canby, “The Last Metro” The
New York Times (12 October 1980) online at http: movies.nytimes.com/ movie/review?res=EE05E7DF1730BA2CA1494CCOB779
(seen 27/11/2011).
[ii] While he was born in 1932 as the
son of Gaston Lévy, a dentist, and Berthe Kahn, it was not until 1968 that
Truffault discovered this Jewish parentage, having been brought up by Jeanne de
Monferrand. His mother had later married
Roland Truffaut in 1934, while his father wed Andrée Blum the year
previous. The revelation of his
biological connection to a Jewish family came too late to influence his
character or education. Nor is it enough
to explain Truffault’s break with fellow director Jean-Luc Godard over the
Swiss-French celebrity’s vicious anti-Semitic (he called Truffault “un sae
juif,” a dirty Jew) and anti-Zionist remarks (e.g., Israel is “a cancer
on the map of the Middle East”). Steve
Poliak, “Jean-Luc Godard : Anti-Semite or non ? “ Jewish
Literary Review (18 October 2010) online at http://www.jewishliteraryreview.com/2010/10/jean-luc-godard-anti-semite (seen 28/11/ 2011). Also see
Souhail Flouh who discusses the outrage when Godard was offered an Oscar by the
Academy of Film Arts; the Zionist Organization of America, as well as Israeli
groups, asked whether an anti-Semite deserves such an honour. “L’Antisémitisme
de Jean-Luc Godard récompensé d’un Oscar?” Identité juive (9 November 2010) online at http://identitejuive.com/antisemitisme-de-jean-luc-god
(seen 26/11/2011).
[iii] Basic details of this film at Au
Revoir les Enfants, IMDb available online http://www.imdhb.com/
title/tt0092593
(seen 29/11/2011); further discussion continues in a series of comments
appended to the original notice on the amazon.com blog section at http://www.amazon.com/Au-RevoirpEnfants-Criterion-Collection/dp/
B0009HLCS8 (seen
29/22/2011).
[iv] Rita Kermley, « Au Revoir
Les Enfants », Washington Post (14 March 1988) online at http://www.
washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/lomngterm/movies/video/aurevoirlesenfants (seen 29/11/2011).
[iv] Thorn Hill, “A Magical Film
About Friendship in a Terrible Time” online thornhillatthemovies.com (Venice,
CA, 21 April 2006) and included in the Criterion Collection DVD of the film
advertised on the amazon.com site. Hill mentions how “sad” the film is, and
this comment like his other remarks mix some interesting insights with a
generally superficial, sentimental approach.
“All thee different layers help to make the story more realistic”, he
says, for instance, but this a film not just about friendship or courage, but
about terrible ironies and tragic fault lines that persist in French society;
and then, given the weakness of this review, in American society as well..
[v] Thorn Hill, “A Magical Film
About Friendship in a Terrible Time” online thornhillatthemovies.com (Venice,
CA, 21 April 2006) and included in the Criterion Collection DVD of the film
advertised on the amazon.com site. Hill mentions how “sad” the film is, and
this comment like his other remarks mix some interesting insights with a
generally superficial, sentimental approach.
“All thee different layers help to make the story more realistic”, he
says, for instance, but this a film not just about friendship or courage, but
about terrible ironies and tragic fault lines that persist in French society;
and then, given the weakness of this review, in American society as well.
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